what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Casual Vacancy by J.K. RowlingLittle, Brown (2012)
It was Ian Parker’s piece in the New Yorker back in October that made me want to read The Casual Vacancy: in that piece, Parker describes it as “a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama,” and says the plot focuses on several households in a fictional…
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Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane WilliamsMcSweeney’s Publishing, 2012
One of the quotes on the back cover of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty is from Ben Marcus, who calls Diane Williams’s stories the “ideal delivery system” for “the uncanny”: that was the closest thing I could find as a point of entry to these fifty-one short short stories. Or maybe that’s not entirely true:…
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The Duel by Heinrich von KleistTranslated by Annie JanuschMelville House, 2011
This is the second of the five books called The Duel in Melville House’s Art of the Novella series that I’ve read, and the second that I haven’t been crazy about, though I’m still curious to read the others and see how I feel about them. I think there are two main things that contribute…
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The Thing about Thugs by Tabish KhairHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012 (Originally HarperCollins, 2010)
The thing about The Thing about Thugs that’s most pleasing to me is the way it’s told, the way the narrative perspective and style shifts. There’s the first-person narration of a present-day author-figure who finds a bundle of notes from the mid-1800s in his grandfather’s library in India: the notes are in Farsi and are…
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The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson WalkerRandom House, 2012
I really like the premise of The Age of Miracles: it’s set in California in the not-too-distant future, and the world is not so different from ours, except for one thing, one big thing: the rotation of the planet has started slowing down. The Age of Miracles is partly the story of the slowing, as…
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Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms by Richard ForteyKnopf, 2011
Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms (which was originally published by HarperCollins in the UK in 2011, as Survivors) was an extraordinarily slow read for me, though I’m not sure how much I can blame the book for that. I started reading it while I was in England for work, which meant I started it at…
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John Saturnall’s Feast by Lawrence NorfolkGrove Press, 2012 (Originally Bloomsbury)
John Saturnall’s Feast starts with a book within a book: it opens with an excerpt from “The Book of John Saturnall, with the Particulars of that famous Cook’s most Privy Arts, including the Receipts for his notorious Feast“: the book’s fictional protagonist, then, is both a cook and an author, and this is the story…
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Vintage Cakes by Julie RichardsonTen Speed Press (Crown/Random House), 2012
Vintage Cakes is the kind of book that should be really appealing to me. Julie Richardson, who owns Baker & Spice Bakery in Portland, Oregon, inherited the contents of an old filing cabinet from the previous bakery that was in the space Baker & Spice now inhabits. As she writes in the introduction to this…