Category: Fiction

The back cover of The Sextine Chapel (originally published in French in 2005) says that it “harken[s] back” to Singular Pleasures by Harry Mathews, who, like Le Tellier, is a member of Oulipo. (Indeed, Le Tellier dedicated the book to Mathews, including a nod to Singular Pleasures in the dedication.) I haven’t read Mathews’s book…

Talismano, which was originally published in French by Éditions Sindbad in 1987, must have been quite a lot of work (and perhaps also quite a lot of fun) to translate. In her introduction, Jane Kuntz calls the book “willfully cryptic” and talks about how Meddeb’s language is a French inflected by Arabic, and not just…

True story: my high school had (and for all I know, still has) a tradition of having a “freshman play”: the first play of the school year, during my high school career, was put on by the whole freshman class, and only the freshman class (with some advice and assistance from the drama teacher and…

I read and really liked Ella Minnow Pea back in 2004 (I am a sucker for epistolary novels and also for wordplay) but I hadn’t sought out or heard about anything else by Mark Dunn until I saw Jenny’s post about Under the Harrow back in June. The promise of another quirkily charming book by…

(This is the sequel to The Magicians and it’s basically impossible to talk about without mentioning some key plot points/spoilers from the first book. So if you don’t want to see those, stop reading now.) At the end of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater changes his mind about giving up magic entirely, about resigning himself to…

I first read this book in October 2009, and I don’t have much to add to my original post about it, which is here. This summer, I heard that there was a sequel out, and promptly put a hold on the sequel at the library, but felt like I should re-read this first. I felt…

A nighttime view of New Venice, 1908: They were now entering the centre of the city, an off-white grid of frozen canals and deserted avenues, lined with impressive Neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings. In the twilight, their incongruous stuccoed, statue-haunted silhouettes, rising darker against the darkening horizon, gave the eerie impression that they had been…

Lady Alexia Maccon is pregnant, and since she’s a preternatural, a.k.a. “soulless,” and her husband’s a werewolf, no one’s quite sure how the child is going to turn out. Rumor has it that the child is likely to be a creature called a “soul-stealer” or “skin-stalker,” someone both mortal and immortal, and the vampires of…

Apparently June is my month for reading and really liking books by Michal Ajvaz. I read and enjoyed The Other City last year (I wrote about it here), and this year I couldn’t resist The Golden Age when I saw it at the library. The back cover describes The Golden Age as “a fantastical travelogue…

In Office Hours, which traces two office romances (focusing on the woman in each affair: one is Stella, a middle-aged high-level executive who falls for Rhys, a 27-year trainee, and the other is Bella, a 27-year old personal assistant/researcher and single mom who falls for her middle-aged boss, James) is compelling, funny, and also somewhat…