Category: Fiction

What I like most about this book is how concerned it is with stories as such, with lies and fictions. Jonas Woldemariam has a degree in English and a foreign-sounding last name: it’s the name, he thinks, that got him a full-time job as a receptionist/factotum at a refugee resettlement center after a string of…

In the June 28, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, James Wood started a review of this book by calling it “richly sown with beauty,” then going on to call Foulds’s novel “a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose.” High praise, and…

Great House starts off confusing and compelling: “All Rise,” the first chapter, opens like this: Talk to him. Your Honor, in the winter of 1972 R and I broke up, or I should say he broke up with me. (3) As the narrator continues we learn more about her: her career as a writer, her…

I’m not going to lie: I checked this book out of the library in part because of the excellent cover image, which is a photo from William Hundley’s Entoptic Phenomena series. Plus, it’s published by Melville House, a small press I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now: I’ve walked by their bookstore/office…

In this, the third Flavia de Luce mystery (after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, both of which I read and liked last May ), we once again find ourselves in the little village of Bishop’s Lacey, which is again beset by mysterious criminal happenings.…

This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like: autonomy, n. “I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I…

This book, which was originally published in Hungarian in 1942, is very much about the ends of things, the passing of time: the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the end of the nineteenth century, the end of a friendship, the end of a marriage, the end of an affair. Henrik, the reclusive General, lives alone…

This book and I didn’t totally click, and I’m not sure I can articulate why. The back cover describes it as “part novel and part memoir,” and its 100 short sections tell the story of a life: childhood, marriage, parenting, travel. It’s set mostly in Israel, with bits elsewhere (primarily Japan), and it sometimes reads…

The back cover blurb mentions the “off-kilter world” of Finley, our narrator: that’s an understatement. This book is a detective story but not really, or rather, it’s a detective story about finding oneself. It’s set in a world that is almost our own but not quite, or maybe it is our world and all the…

After I finished reading Travels in Siberia, I found myself in a sort of critical reading mood—unsure what to read next, and fearful that whatever I read wouldn’t live up to the intelligence, humor, and range of Ian Frazier’s book. I decided that something short, light, and fictional was the way to go, and so…