what I’ve been reading lately:
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The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett ThomasMariner Books, 2010 (Originally 2006)
Ariel Manto is in the slightly weird position of being a PhD student without anyone to supervise her work: she’s writing a thesis on thought experiments, but her supervisor, who is one of the few people in the world to have done research on Thomas E. Lumas, a (fictional) nineteenth-century writer who is also one
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Green Is for World by Juliana LeslieCoffee House Press, 2012
I picked this book up at the library based mostly on the cover art (a collage by the author) and the back cover blurbs, which talk about how these poems are, in the words of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “trafficking in the near-spoken, the peculiar particulars, and in the unseen textures of lived experience.” The twenty-three
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This One Is Mine by Maria SempleLittle, Brown and Company (Hachette), 2008
In the reading group guide in the back of a different edition of this book, Maria Semple says this: “When I decided to write a novel, I had just finished rereading The House of Mirth and was in the middle of rereading Anna Karenina. I realized my favorite kind of story involves strong, singular women
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PopCo by Scarlett ThomasHarvest (Harcourt), 2004 (Originally Fourth Estate)
“If you ever plan to hang around train stations in the middle of the night, you should always make sure you can hear your own footsteps, and, if you are at all musical, you should try to work out which notes you make as you walk, as it stops you from being lonely, not that
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Smut: Stories by Alan BennettPicador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2012 (Originally Faber and Faber, 2011)
There are two stories, or maybe you could call them novellas, in Smut: the first, which I liked better, is the longer of the pair, at 93 pages; the other is 59 pages. Both stories are, to a large extent, about secrets, or about things people think are secret that aren’t secret after all, and
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Picture Me Gone by Meg RosoffG.P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin), 2013
I liked the voice and tone of Picture Me Gone from the first page, which starts with 12-year-old Mila talking about her name: “The first Mila was a dog. A Bedlington terrier. It helps if you know these things,” she says, and then, a bit farther down the page: “I don’t believe in reincarnation. It
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Mr. Wuffles! by David WiesnerClarion Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2013
I really like wordless (or almost-wordless) picture books in general, and this story of a cat with “a silly name that belies his predatory nature” (in the words of Sarah Harrison Smith, writing in the New York Times) is a whole lot of fun. Mr. Wuffles, the title character, isn’t interested in any of the
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Kehua! by Fay WeldonEuropa Editions, 2013
“Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise” (32). So says the narrator of Kehua!, an author-character who is writing a “tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse” that sprawls instead of rushing along (15). The book is split between the author-character’s own experience
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Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria SempleLittle, Brown and Company (Hachette), 2012
“The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.” You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question” (3). This is how Where’d You Go, Bernadette starts: with Bee Branch letting us know that her mom
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The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by SakiNew York Review of Books, 2013
These twenty-six stories by H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pen-name of Saki, are selections from five volumes that were originally published between 1904 and 1919. They’re all fairly funny, though I found the first few stories the weakest. In those early stories, like “Reginald at the Carlton” or “Reginald on Besetting Things,” we’re reading