Category: Fiction

Narrative restraint; a narrator who’s unreliable because memory is unreliable, and memory that’s unreliable for so many reasons —distance, pride—and what happens when that unreliability affects everyday events, when it affects what happens now and not just how we remember things. This is an elegant book, a quiet book, also perhaps a sad book, in…

This is a beautifully designed volume: the pink flowers on the otherwise dark cover, the wine-colored endpapers, the elegant type, the rough edges of the pages. The stories it contains are clever and pleasing and good for quiet autumn or winter evenings: “On Lickerish Hill,” (a reworking of the Tom Tit Tot story) and “Mrs.…

Absorbing, beautiful, detailed & precise in descriptions of everything from emotional states to the mechanics of bridge-building to the many herbs and spices that can be used to flavor gin. And the sense of place, the 18th-century New York family names that linger as place-names, street-names: Joralemon, Sands, Boerum, Schermerhorn, Luquer. I found myself daydreaming…

Wit and cleverness and social climbing and downfall: an epic that’s “a novel without a hero,” just so much hypocrisy and dissatisfaction.

Such a pleasing novel, a story of Boston in the early 20th century, Boston in the influenza epidemic of 1918, bits of the past and bits of the present, songs and newspaper articles, how different people see the same events, and oh, streetcars and accents and imagining how streets were different a hundred years ago,…

Long highways connecting the countryside, connections between places, connections between people. The sense of a vague and shadowy world: a world the narrator doesn’t know, not really, and a world that the reader can’t know, either. This book is about love and sadness, the relentlessness of motion and distance, how the past is lost to…

James’s sentences are often exquisite: sentences as long as paragraphs, sentences full of commas, phrases nested like Russian dolls. His style forces me to slow down, to re-read passages, and I appreciate his pacing, his rhythm. Even the long slow middle of the book, a period of waiting for Kate and Merton and Milly, and…

Woolf’s first novel is full of luminous detail, perfect descriptin: a boat moving along a river, a thunderstorm, the way night falls or morning breaks. Familiar themes of aloneness, the inadequacy of language, the difficulty of communication: but here that’s all combined with the disconnect between the sexes, which makes this book feel frustratingly dated…

Perfectly faux-Victorian, the twists & turns of the mind & of prison corridors, allusive and delicious and dark. A story told in the form of diary entries, secrets and private thoughts.

A story told backwards; a story of how people came to be where (who) they are. The start of the first sentence: “So this, said Kay to herself, is the kind of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped […]” Elsewhere, Kay remarks that people’s pasts are “so much more interesting…