Category: Fiction

“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…

I knew Jenny Davidson’s name because she’s a professor at Columbia, which is where I went to college: I didn’t take any classes with her but I went to an informational talk she gave for people who might want to go to grad school in the humanities (which is something I decided I did not,…

This book (which was originally published in French in 2003) is the third book I’ve read by Jouet, and my second-favorite, after Upstaged, which I read in 2011. It’s, well, about a bus trip, but not really: it’s about story and possibility and motion, and it’s pleasingly metafictional, and I probably would have liked it…

Meg, the narrator of Our Tragic Universe, is a writer: she’s been working for years on a novel that she can’t seem to finish, or even properly start. In the meantime, she’s been ghostwriting YA books, and also writing her own genre fiction, and also reviewing pop science books for a newspaper, the latter of…

The ten stories in Errantry range in length from sixty pages to three pages, with most falling somewhere in the middle, and, as the subtitle puts it, they’re all “strange.” Often, the strangeness is something unexplained or not fully resolved: a man goes to Cornwall in part to repeat a trip his now-dead wife took…

Oops, so much for sticking to the TBR Double Dog Dare until April 1st. I heard that there was a new Flavia de Luce mystery out, and promptly put a hold on it at the library, expecting it might take a while to get to me. But it didn’t, and once I got the email…

I should perhaps start by saying that Cryptonomicon probably isn’t a book I would have picked up on my own. I’d heard good things about it, and all my friends on Goodreads who have rated this book either liked it or really liked it (four gave it five stars, two gave it four stars, and…

It was Ian Parker’s piece in the New Yorker back in October that made me want to read The Casual Vacancy: in that piece, Parker describes it as “a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama,” and says the plot focuses on several households in a fictional…

One of the quotes on the back cover of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty is from Ben Marcus, who calls Diane Williams’s stories the “ideal delivery system” for “the uncanny”: that was the closest thing I could find as a point of entry to these fifty-one short short stories. Or maybe that’s not entirely true:…