Category: Fiction

Beautiful images: a “vast inkwash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows,” the blue of a celadon plate, the yellow of mustard-blossoms. A journey in vignettes and inaction: a painter walks through the mountains, stays at an inn with a hot spring, flirts with the daughter of the innkeeper,…

This novel’s funny moments, and there are a fair number of them, are very funny. The narrator’s a slacker named Shane who steals saltshakers, temps at an insurance agency, sleeps with his landlord’s wife, is dating a woman who beats him up in bed repeatedly. He seems to spend a lot of time at his…

Yambo wakes in a fog: he’s lost his episodic memory, though his semantic memory remains. He speaks in stock phrases and quotations; he remembers lines of poetry but not his own life. And so he returns to his childhood country house to try to remember who he is, digging through boxes of notebooks, records, and…

When Dickens is sentimental or moralizing, things drag; it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes. I was trying to articulate, the other day, what I found off-putting about this book: the plot twists that feel manipulative, the way the characterizations are so black and white, morally speaking. But there’s plenty that’s good too: plenty that’s…

I read a post about The Nature of Monsters over at A Work in Progress a few months ago, and that description of the bookseller’s shop that Danielle quotes was enough to make me want to read it. I like how gripping the story is, and the boldness of its heroine, and of course I…

Clever & sprawling; I loved all the detail and sense of place (Smyrna, Detroit) and cultural/familial history, plus all the Homeric turns of phrase (someone drives a “wine-dark Buick”).

A book to read slowly, in sips. One image, then the next, then the next: how jarring it is at the start, to step into one character’s thoughts, then another’s, then another’s. The tension between aloneness and connection, or the balance. How time passes. The poetry of place: the sea, the garden, St. Paul’s with…

Loosely interwoven stories: Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel, a nameless narrator. Areas of overlap: the Liar’s Paradox, a fortune-telling gypsy woman, a vivid blue, Snow White. I wanted to like this book so much more than I did, though I enjoyed the parts about Turing, maybe because his strangenesses aren’t as off-putting as Gödel’s paranoia, maybe…

“Imagine the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, when darkness was newly separated from light.”—thus begins Yves Gundron’s “treatise on the nature of change.” Yves lives in a village called Mandragora, a village nestled below mountains, not far from a city called Nnms. Yves and his neighbors are farmers; Yves is also an inventor, and his…