Category: Fiction

Barley Patch starts with a question posed by Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, a question Rilke says all writers should ask themselves, namely: “Must I write?” (9) This question leads to other questions, so the book is structured as the narrator interviewing himself or explaining himself, except that the questions are sometimes so…

In her introduction to Berlin Stories, Susan Bernofsky notes that “while we tend to call these texts “stories,” Walser himself described them as “prose pieces”; this hybrid of story and essay remained his genre of choice for most of his writing career” (xi). The pieces are short—many are just two or three pages—and they read,…

In a section at the end of this book called “Thoughts on Myths,” A.S. Byatt quotes Nietzsche, who wrote about myths as “presiding over the growth of the child’s mind” (158). Byatt writes about Ragnarök, the end of the gods and the end of the world, as presiding over the growth of her own mind,…

Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that. There’d be a window, wouldn’t there? Were there any books in there? What would you do all day? (44) There’s the premise, in…

I liked the last two short stories in this book the best, because one is a fairy tale and the other’s a spy story gone strange. Emmanuel’s style, which is sometimes dreamy but sometimes just trite, works for me when it’s playing with a genre like that: the other four stories in this book sometimes…

I found Light on the sidewalk and brought it home on the strength of the back cover blurb, a quote from The New York Times Book Review that says the book is “a luminous prose poem of a novel” and also calls it “unhurried” and “richly descriptive.” I’d never heard of Figes, and have never…

Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties,” enjoys the ordinary routines of her days, months, years (5). She works part-time at an organisation that helps “impoverished gentlewomen”; she is involved in her local church and is close friends with the vicar, Father Malory, and his sister…

I think what I liked best about this book was its setting: Cambridge, England, in 1171. Spring and the rain and the cherry blossoms, and a city centered around its river, a city of traders and barges and punts and quays and bridges. Comparing it to her hometown of Salerno, the main character thinks about…

Books that are “writerly” or self-consciously “literary” in certain ways really appeal to me, and part of what I enjoyed about Jamrach’s Menagerie is that writerly charm. First, there’s the prose: it’s lush, detailed, descriptive, full of place, of weather, of sound, of slants of light. It’s beautiful (though there are also, you should be…

It’s May 1873, and Charles Lenox, now 42, is pretty settled as a member of Parliament, and not really an active detective any longer. When this book starts, he’s in Plymouth, about to set sail on a ship called the Lucy, on a trip with two purposes. Publicly, he’s traveling as an emissary from the…