what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Ring by Elisabeth HoremTranslated by Jane KuntzDalkey Archive Press, 2013
The Ring (which was originally published in French in 1994) is the story of a man adrift. At the start of the book, Quentin Corval’s lover announces she’s leaving him for his brother. They’re off to America, where Quentin’s brother has landed a teaching job. “I’m leaving too,” Quentin says, all bluster (7.) Pressed, he…
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Artful by Ali SmithThe Penguin Press, 2013
The flap copy says that “Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness,” and that’s a solid description of this smart and satisfying book, which is actually a series of lectures that Smith gave at Oxford in January and February…
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The Middle Stories by Sheila HetiMcSweeney’s Books, 2012 (Originally Anansi, 2001)
This book of thirty short stories is odd and sometimes funny and definitely grew on me: I read it quickly, and wasn’t sure how much I liked it, and then I read it again and I liked it more. (Though, as the blurb on the back cover from Helen DeWitt puts it, “Heti’s stories don’t…
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Climates by André MauroisTranslated by Adriana HunterOther Press, 2012
The first half of Climates, which was originally published in French in 1928, made me think a whole lot about Proust, particularly about The Captive: the story of Philippe, who is consumed by jealousy over the possibility (and, eventually, the actuality) of his wife’s infidelity, has a lot of the same claustrophobia as that book.…
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Silverchest by Carl PhillipsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013
I was going to say that “so what?” is the question of this book—it appears twice in “Blizzard” and again in “Your Body Down in Gold”, and I do think there’s something to that. Phillips, in these poems, is concerned with what matters and what doesn’t, with the vagaries of love and desire, with the…
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The Wind on the Moon by Eric LinklaterNew York Review of Books, 2004 (Originally published in 1944)
At the start of The Wind on the Moon, Dinah and Dorinda are watching their father, Major Palfrey, pack his trunk: he’s getting ready to go to war. He tells them to be good while he’s gone, but no one’s very sure the girls will be able to: Major Palfrey says the ring of mist…
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La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams by Georges PerecTranslated by Daniel Levin BeckerMelville House, 2012
La Boutique Obscure is Georges Perec’s dream journal, a record of 124 dreams from the period from May 1968 to August 1972, complete with an index (which is well worth reading: it’s got entries like “Fictitious names (?)” and “Retracing the same path” and “Remembering and forgetting” and “Dreaming about dreaming, or about waking up,…
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The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmannecco (HarperCollins), 2012
“Love and connection”: this is what one Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, gaming-parlor proprietress and cartomancer, prophesies for one of her customers, Emil Larsson. Having had a vision about his fate, Mrs. Sparrow says she’ll read his cards: she practices a Tarot-like form of divination using a spread of eight cards called the Octavo, in which each…
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Invisibility by Andrea Cremer and David LevithanPhilomel Books (Penguin), 2013
Stephen is invisible: he was born that way. He doesn’t know the logistics, just that he can’t see himself, and no one else has ever seen him, either. He knows his invisibility is the result of a curse, but by the time he’s almost sixteen, and his mother (who raised him) is dead, it’s just…
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The Reverberator by Henry JamesMelville House, 2013
The Reverberator, which was originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1888, is about Americans abroad and the increasing intrusiveness of a certain kind of gossipy newspaper. It’s also, mostly, about people: how they act, what they say, what motivates them. It’s set in Paris, but aside from a trip to Saint-Germain and a ride through…