Category: Fiction

Ariel Manto is in the slightly weird position of being a PhD student without anyone to supervise her work: she’s writing a thesis on thought experiments, but her supervisor, who is one of the few people in the world to have done research on Thomas E. Lumas, a (fictional) nineteenth-century writer who is also one…

In the reading group guide in the back of a different edition of this book, Maria Semple says this: “When I decided to write a novel, I had just finished rereading The House of Mirth and was in the middle of rereading Anna Karenina. I realized my favorite kind of story involves strong, singular women…

“If you ever plan to hang around train stations in the middle of the night, you should always make sure you can hear your own footsteps, and, if you are at all musical, you should try to work out which notes you make as you walk, as it stops you from being lonely, not that…

There are two stories, or maybe you could call them novellas, in Smut: the first, which I liked better, is the longer of the pair, at 93 pages; the other is 59 pages. Both stories are, to a large extent, about secrets, or about things people think are secret that aren’t secret after all, and…

“Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise” (32). So says the narrator of Kehua!, an author-character who is writing a “tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse” that sprawls instead of rushing along (15). The book is split between the author-character’s own experience…

“The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.” You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question” (3). This is how Where’d You Go, Bernadette starts: with Bee Branch letting us know that her mom…

These twenty-six stories by H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pen-name of Saki, are selections from five volumes that were originally published between 1904 and 1919. They’re all fairly funny, though I found the first few stories the weakest. In those early stories, like “Reginald at the Carlton” or “Reginald on Besetting Things,” we’re reading…

I saw the cover of this novel on CoverSpy and really liked the Brownstone-Brooklyn-meets-Hokusai design, so when I saw it at the library, I checked it out. The first-person narrator is sixty-ish Seido Oda, who was born in a small village in the mountains in rural Japan: he tells of how his parents were innkeepers,…

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…