Category: Fiction

“Gotta tell us if we’re in a comedy or a mellow drama or a whodidit or what they call a theater of the absurd,” drawls a convenience store employee toward the middle of this book, continuing: “Ya can’t just leave us standin’ on stage with no dialogue.” […]”It’s a whodunit,” Blue van Meer answers, asks…

“Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit”: this on the second page of this book, and of its narrator’s diary, but of course nothing goes as planned. Charles Arrowby, fancying himself Prospero, can’t really give up power (or the illusion of it): the playwright-director can’t stop scripting scenes, moving people one way and…

I read this book quickly, both because it was pleasing and because it made me a little anxious: knowing that something would go wrong, feeling, along with the narrator, the potential for embarrassment around every corner. As much as the phrase “in this moment” (or “in that moment”) is used (and it’s used a lot),…

These short stories have a distinctive voice: wry narration, strings of synonyms: “I willfully purposefully doggedly […] pursue follow chase desire” (p 28), parenthetical asides. There’s a preoccupation with the past, with remembering and misremembering: in the title story, every concrete detail slips and shifts, the story is one “maybe” after another. (If the facts…

The story of Homer’s Odyssey, retold: a feminist take that focuses on Penelope (who narrates, from the underworld) and the story of the twelve hanged maids (who are killed by Telemachus and Odysseus, after the slaughter of the suitors) . Clever, sometimes forcedly so, but well-written. The device of the maids-as-chorus, delivering interludes in varying…

A few weeks ago, I read this post about reading on the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog, which led me to this post in the Boston Globe’s “Brainiac” blog, which, in turn, led me to this piece by Lindsay Waters in the Chronicle, which contains the following quote. I have increasingly come to believe that…

Light and place and atmosphere: weathers and seasons beautifully described. This book is full of unusual words, elegant turns of phrase. Not much action, but the past: what we remember and how memory is true or false, the things we don’t see at all or the things we see wrongly, or the things we see…

A novel in vignettes, in prose-poems: a novel told from the viewpoint of a Czech city, and so containing flashes of the lives of its inhabitants. The city in question is Most, a mining town that was “literally relocated to get to the brown coal beneath it,” as the flap-copy explains. “Sometimes I feel like…

This weekend I heard someone talk about how much she dislikes Fingersmith, because the deceit bothers her. The layers of deceit were precisely what made that book compelling for me: compelling enough to read it from start to finish on one long plane ride. But I can understand feeling that there’s something sordid about a…

Two girls, and a winter landscape: the hard ground, white rime, “steel-ice” and snow that blankets everything. Dream-logic, repetition, “the play between what has been and what is to come” (p 86). Reading this book makes me want to re-read Acts of Levitation by Laynie Browne, which would, I’m sure, make me want to read…