Category: Fiction

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.…

In the first chapter of The Psychology of Time Travel, we’re introduced to “four young scientists” (Margaret, Lucille, Grace, and Barbara) who have been working in an isolated laboratory and who manage, in 1967, to build a working time machine. The technology can’t take people back to any point prior to its own invention, but…

I didn’t realize until the end that Scattered All Over the Earth is the first volume of a trilogy, but now I am very excited at the prospect of seeing where the story will go next and what the structure of the next two books will be. This one is told in alternating first-person narration…

This is the second book by Modiano I’ve read, and I liked this one more than The Black Notebook, though maybe I’m just more in the mood for this kind of atmospheric novel at the moment. The themes (and plots) of the two books are similar, and I get the impression this Modiano’s thing: a…

My experience of reading Assembly felt a bit like my experience of reading little scratch last year, in that I picked it up because I’d heard it was inventive in form/structure, but didn’t realize ahead of time that it was also going to be pretty bleak. This, from page 3 of Assembly, gives a sense,…

Bibliolepsy is one of those novels where I loved the beginning and loved the end, but found my attention flagging a bit in the middle—which I think is probably more due to my life/schedule in general right now than to any flaws of the book itself—though maybe it was also because I paused a lot…

Winter in Sokcho is the kind of book I very much enjoy: the chapters are small vignettes, the language is simultaneously spare and atmospheric. It’s also sometimes a bit uncomfortable, edging on grotesque, with a mysterious ending, but I think it all works. At the start of the book we meet the unnamed narrator, who’s…