Category: Fiction

This collection of fifteen short stories (which I heard about via Goodreads then saw at the library) has been good jury duty reading, by which I mean it’s light and easy enough that I could comfortably read it during breaks, even if several simultaneous conversations were happening around me. “Light and easy,” though, isn’t necessarily…

There’s a piece in what purpose do i serve in your life called “cybersex” that consists mostly of screenshots of Facebook chats between Marie Calloway and one or more interlocutors, with the other party’s name/photo blocked out. In one of these conversations, in which a guy talks about wanting to be rough with her, Marie…

The No Variations (originally published in Spanish in 2007), is described in Darren Koolman’s Translator’s Preface as “an omnium gatherum of obscure references, cryptic anagrams, parenthetical remarks, indecipherable aide-mémoire, overblown critical extracts, imperfectly-wrought poems, bewildering drafts of unfinished stories, characters with unpronounceable names…everything, in other words, a reader might expect to find in the diary…

The Ring (which was originally published in French in 1994) is the story of a man adrift. At the start of the book, Quentin Corval’s lover announces she’s leaving him for his brother. They’re off to America, where Quentin’s brother has landed a teaching job. “I’m leaving too,” Quentin says, all bluster (7.) Pressed, he…

This book of thirty short stories is odd and sometimes funny and definitely grew on me: I read it quickly, and wasn’t sure how much I liked it, and then I read it again and I liked it more. (Though, as the blurb on the back cover from Helen DeWitt puts it, “Heti’s stories don’t…

The first half of Climates, which was originally published in French in 1928, made me think a whole lot about Proust, particularly about The Captive: the story of Philippe, who is consumed by jealousy over the possibility (and, eventually, the actuality) of his wife’s infidelity, has a lot of the same claustrophobia as that book.…

“Love and connection”: this is what one Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, gaming-parlor proprietress and cartomancer, prophesies for one of her customers, Emil Larsson. Having had a vision about his fate, Mrs. Sparrow says she’ll read his cards: she practices a Tarot-like form of divination using a spread of eight cards called the Octavo, in which each…

The Reverberator, which was originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1888, is about Americans abroad and the increasing intrusiveness of a certain kind of gossipy newspaper. It’s also, mostly, about people: how they act, what they say, what motivates them. It’s set in Paris, but aside from a trip to Saint-Germain and a ride through…