Category: Fiction

It’s satisfying when I pick up a book I’ve been meaning to read for years and end up feeling like I appreciate it more now than I would have if I’d read it when I first heard of it, thanks to other things I’ve read now that I hadn’t read yet then. This book made…

At the start of LaserWriter II we’re introduced to Claire, who’s 19 and applying for a job at Tekserve, an old-school, pre-Genius-Bar computer/printer repair shop that used to be on 23rd Street. We learn that Claire grew up in a household loyal to Apple from the start: they had the “first Mac, and an Apple…

I’m glad I read the Melville House “Art of the Novella” edition of this book: the “Illuminations” at the end of the book added some much-needed context, as it’s been a while since I studied transcendentalism in school. Having both “The Transcendentalist” and “Civil Disobedience” included with Bartleby the Scrivener felt really useful in terms…

I don’t usually read “chick-lit” or “women’s fiction” or “romance” or “romantic comedy” or whatever you want to call this, but I got this ebook for free via Amazon First Reads last May and figured I’d give it a try. In the first chapter we’re introduced to Dylan Delacroix, a corporate productivity consultant in Houston:…

Early in The Book of Form and Emptiness. we learn about the sudden accidental death of Kenji Oh, a jazz clarinetist who was born in Japan and had been living in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Annabelle, and their kid, Benny. The book is mostly Benny’s story—it’s about how he starts hearing voices after…

August, the narrator of Another Brooklyn, is an anthropologist in her mid-thirties; she studies death rituals/observances in cultures across the world. When the book opens she’s back in Bushwick, where she grew up, clearing out her father’s apartment after his death. But the book is mostly about August’s childhood and her teen years, and particularly…

As Jo Hamya says in her Author’s Note, “Three Rooms is a novel about the danger of withholding capital, principally domestic and financial.” It quotes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and exists partly in relation to Woolf’s ideas around how “intellectual freedom depends on material things.” It follows the unnamed narrator as she…

The Governesses is short and strange: fable-like, dream-like, with three governesses like maenads and/or like The Three Graces (to whom they are explicitly compared, I think more than once). There is a house and a garden, and another house across the road in which lives an elderly gentleman who likes to watch the governesses through…

In Beautiful World, Where Are You we meet two of the characters, Alice (who’s a novelist) and Felix (who works in a warehouse) as they’re meeting each other, on their first date after having messaged each other on Tinder. Later, we’re introduced to the novel’s two other main characters, Eileen (Alice’s best friend) and Simon…

Happy spooky season! I somehow had never read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving and now seemed like the right time to rectify that. Before reading the story I think I could have told you that it included “Ichabod Crane” and a “Headless Horseman” but I think that’s all I knew about it.…