what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Guest Cat by Takashi HiraideTranslated by Eric SellandNew Directions, 2014
This quiet novella, which originally appeared in Japanese in 2001, is the story of a couple in their thirties who live in a suburban-ish neighborhood of Tokyo in the late 1980s, in a rented cottage that used to be a mansion’s guesthouse. Their cottage is next to an alley, and a neighbor across the alley…
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Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine AngelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 (Originally Allen Lane, 2012)
The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn’t to say this book is bad, just that it didn’t…
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Tristano: A Novel (#11232) by Nanni BalestriniTranslated by Mike HarakisVerso, 2014
I picked up this book because of the flap copy, which starts like this: “This book is unique as no other novel can claim to be: one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations of the same work of fiction.” As the flap copy goes on to explain, the book “comprises ten chapters, and the fifteen pairs of…
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Quick Question: New Poems by John Ashberyecco (HarperCollins), 2012
I have a hard time with John Ashbery’s poems, but I keep trying anyway. I think the problem is that I like to read poems that are more recognizably set in this world; I like poems that are “about” everyday life but told in a way that focuses on luminous detail, or that somehow makes…
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Pietr the Latvian by Georges SimenonTranslated by David Bellos, 2013
Pietr the Latvian, which was originally published in serial form in French in 1930, is the first of Georges Simenon’s novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, and is the first of Simenon’s novels that I’ve read. It’s no cosy mystery: it’s a gritty police procedural (albeit light on procedure) that moves back and forth between…
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Landline by Rainbow RowellSt. Martin’s Press, 2014
Landline was a fun, quick, funny read for me: I finished it in one delicious Saturday, and kept interrupting my boyfriend’s TV-watching to read him parts I liked. The book is the story of a marriage having a rough patch, or maybe it’s been having a rough patch for a while. Georgie McCool is in…
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The Paying Guests by Sarah WatersRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2014
The Paying Guests is part romance, part crime story, but isn’t only either of those things: the first book Waters mentions in her Author’s Note is Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, and I wonder how this book reads to someone who has read a lot of the…
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Can’t and Won’t by Lydia DavisFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
Can’t and Won’t is made up of five numbered sections, each containing between twenty-three and twenty-six pieces, for a total of one hundred and twenty two pieces, many but not all of which are quite short. I really like the everydayness of these stories, and their crispness, and their humor, and how poignant some of…
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Full Fathom Five by Max GladstoneTor, 2014
Full Fathom Five is the third book of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, and it’s definitely my favorite, partly but not entirely because it features repeat characters from the first two books in addition to entirely new ones. I like that each book so far has been set in a different place in the world Gladstone…
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Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu MiaojinTranslated by Ari Larissa HeinrichNew York Review of Books, 2014
“I must accept this fate of being abandoned and betrayed; I must accept my helplessness. There’s no way for me not to lose. There’s nothing I can do for myself” (50). So writes the narrator of Last Words from Montmartre, in one of the twenty-one numbered letters that make up the bulk of the text…