Category: Fiction

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:…

This is the second of the five books called The Duel in Melville House’s Art of the Novella series that I’ve read, and the second that I haven’t been crazy about, though I’m still curious to read the others and see how I feel about them. I think there are two main things that contribute…

The thing about The Thing about Thugs that’s most pleasing to me is the way it’s told, the way the narrative perspective and style shifts. There’s the first-person narration of a present-day author-figure who finds a bundle of notes from the mid-1800s in his grandfather’s library in India: the notes are in Farsi and are…

I really like the premise of The Age of Miracles: it’s set in California in the not-too-distant future, and the world is not so different from ours, except for one thing, one big thing: the rotation of the planet has started slowing down. The Age of Miracles is partly the story of the slowing, as…

John Saturnall’s Feast starts with a book within a book: it opens with an excerpt from “The Book of John Saturnall, with the Particulars of that famous Cook’s most Privy Arts, including the Receipts for his notorious Feast“: the book’s fictional protagonist, then, is both a cook and an author, and this is the story…

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is a collection of short stories: 30 stories, of varying lengths (one is just one sentence; one is thirty pages) and varying styles (1st-person, 2nd-person, and 3rd person narration are all used; one story is in the form of a numbered list of…

I read and liked Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged last year, so I was excited to happen upon another book by him at the library. But where I found Upstaged smart and funny and engaging, I found Savage odd and distant. There were moments of humor, and moments of beauty, but when I finished reading I wished…

The Uncommon Reader is short and sweet, charming and funny. I feel like every book blogger other than me read this one years ago, so you probably already know the premise, but if you don’t, here it is: the Queen of England (yes, the current one) happens upon a mobile library parked outside Buckingham Palace.…

NW is about the intersecting/intertwined lives of four Londoners (two women and two men) who grew up on the same housing estate in the northwest part of the city. Leah and Natalie, who have been best friends since childhood (back when Natalie was called Keisha: she renamed herself when she left for university) are the…