Category: Fiction

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…

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…