Category: Fiction

In her introduction to the English translation of this book, Patti Smith writes that The Divorce “outlines the process for those wishing to comprehend or to experience the expansive possibilities of a single moment” (viii). That is a perfect description of this book, though it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting when I first picked…

Companion Piece begins and ends with “hello”, or some variation thereof, and that word, one we use all the time without necessarily thinking about the different ways we use it, comes up a lot in the book, most explicitly in a great section toward the end of the book about its possible etymologies and uses…

The protagonist of Meet Us By the Roaring Sea lives in Queens in the not-too-distant future: far enough from now that a building built in the early 2000s is described as old, but not so far from now as to be unrecognizable. The protagonist works in AI and technology has advanced—people’s consumption patterns are monitored…

I’m glad I read this right after Spellbreaker because, as previously mentioned, I really wanted to know how things would work out … but alas, I didn’t like this book as much as I liked that one. For me, the balance of magic and intrigue and romance in the first one was just right; this…

Spellbreaker was an excellent vacation read for me, and I liked it enough that I’m planning to read the sequel right away: this is definitely NOT a standalone novel and I want to know how everything works out. The book opens in England in 1885 with a workhouse on fire and a young girl, Elsie,…

The prologue of this novel sets up what’s to come: it’s 1838 in Gundagai, Australia, and we’re with Wagadhaany, who is four years old, as she listens to her father telling a white settler that he shouldn’t build a house on the land by the river: it’s too flat; there’s a risk of floods. The…

My husband and I moved to a new apartment just over two weeks ago and I feel like there is still so much to do, from updating my address in all the places it needs to be updated to unpacking clothes and books (which we can’t actually do until our new bookcases arrive and storage…

Near the end of Luster the narrator, Edie, is thinking about art and what it does, what it’s for: “A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.” She’s a painter, and how she finds her way back to painting is maybe the most satisfying…

Somehow the back cover blurb for this one had me expecting something more concrete and less philosophical, but I nevertheless enjoyed this novella made of linked vignettes that are mostly “about” the narrator’s passion for Artforum magazine but are also about the human condition: about being a person and having quirks and hobbies and routines…

I heard about An I-Novel thanks to Rebecca Hussey’s Reading Indie email newsletter, in which Rebecca described this as “an autobiographical, autofictional novel that takes place in one day and is thinky, contemplative, and formally innovative” – which a) is a great description of this book and b) really made me want to read it.…