Category: Fiction

Casanova’s 1780 novella is, according to the flap copy, a “thinly-veiled autobiographical work,” and tells the story of a duel that took place in 1766 between Casanova and a member of the Polish court. Having left Venice at the age of twenty-eight, fleeing the law, “the Venetian” at the center of The Duel has made…

Tricks is a book of first encounters: twenty-five hook-ups from 1978, from spring through fall. In his introduction, Roland Barthes calls a trick “the encounter which takes place only once: more than cruising, less than love: an intensity, which passes without regret” (x). The encounter may actually recur; some of these tricks may become more…

Oh, Flavia. Flavia de Luce, heroine of this book and of three others by Bradley, is the best eleven-year-old sleuth/narrator ever. When the book opens, she’s dreaming about ice-skating in an indoor rink at Buckshaw of her own making. (In the dream, she’s flooded the portrait gallery, which is in the unheated wing of the…

Saturday Keith (his parents’ seventh son, named after the day of his birth) is a poet, but he’s feeling glum after some less-than-flattering reviews of his latest book. He’s quit his job at a shipping/exports company, and ends up getting set up as manager of a fancy pub/inn owned by the mother of one of…

In Howards End is on the Landing, Susan Hill mentions The Mysterious Affair at Styles as part of a list of books with good titles, and it reminded me that I haven’t read much by Agatha Christie. Before this, I’d only read Murder on the Orient Express, and I liked detective Hercule Poirot in that…

New York, 1873: We meet a man who performs as Prospero the Enchanter; he meets his five-year-old daughter, Celia. London, 1874: Prospero the Enchanter performs: the theater is crowded and hot, the women in the audience fan themselves. Another night, another illusionist. Except not exactly, because Prospero’s magic is real: “At one point in the…

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…