Category: Fiction

In this interview Lee Rourke says that The Canal is about boredom “and the fetishisation of modern culture and violence (especially the kind of violence that is deemed by its perpetrators to have a ‘just cause’: terrorism is a good example of this). It is also about the Regents Canal in London; a bench; a…

Despite what I said in my post about the previous book in this series, I hadn’t actually sought this fifth and final book out. But then there it was sitting temptingly on the shelf of free-to-take books in the kitchen at work. So I took it. I didn’t read it immediately, and wasn’t even that…

I was fairly delighted, about a hundred pages into You Deserve Nothing, to see the squiggles from the cover image near the top of the page, presented as an excerpt from the notebook of one of the book’s narrators. Gilad Fisher has just moved to Paris, and is a senior at the International School of…

Dogma is the sequel to Spurious, which I read last year and wrote about here. Like the last book, this one follows the meanderings of Lars and W., two English academics who share a tendency toward the apocalyptic and a fondness for gin. As in the last book, there is a lot of angst: about…

Catherine Gehrig has lost her lover of thirteen years: he died suddenly, and because their affair was a secret (he was married), she’s unable to grieve publicly. Except their affair wasn’t entirely a secret: Catherine’s lover worked at the Swinburne Museum, as she also does, and was a close friend of her boss. Knowing she…

I liked the concept of Schematics more than I liked the execution of it. It sounds so promising: the back cover describes it as a “sparse, meditative, and enigmatic narrative embroidered with schematic diagrams,” and in an essay at the end of the book David LaRocca says that “Throughout Schematics Hibbard demonstrates the persuasive power…

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…