what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Saturdays by Elizabeth EnrightSquare Fish, 2008 (Originally Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)
“It would have to rain today,” said Rush, lying flat on his back in front of the fire. “On a Saturday. Certainly. Naturally. Of course. What else would you expect? Good weather is for Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday; and rain’s for Saturday and Sunday, and Christmas vacation and Easter.” “Oh, Rush, do stop grousing,”
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The Golden Age by Michal AjvazTranslated by Andrew OaklandDalkey Archive Press, 2010
Apparently June is my month for reading and really liking books by Michal Ajvaz. I read and enjoyed The Other City last year (I wrote about it here), and this year I couldn’t resist The Golden Age when I saw it at the library. The back cover describes The Golden Age as “a fantastical travelogue
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The Ada Poems by Cynthia ZarinAlfred A. Knopf, 2010
I haven’t yet read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, though I own a copy, but I think that’s OK: I think it’s enough to read The Ada Poems informed just by the quotes from Nabokov that Zarin uses throughout, and by the flap copy, which explains that these poems are “inspired and inhabited by the title
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Eyes in the Fishbowl by Zilpha Keatley SnyderAtheneum, 1968
Dion James has been a fan of Alcott-Simpson’s, the big department store in the city where he lives, since the time he first saw it, back when he was eight or nine and shining shoes on the sidewalks. The first time he went inside, it made an impression: After the ordinary winter world outside, dirty
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In Office Hours by Lucy KellawayGrand Central Publishing (Hachette), 2011
In Office Hours, which traces two office romances (focusing on the woman in each affair: one is Stella, a middle-aged high-level executive who falls for Rhys, a 27-year trainee, and the other is Bella, a 27-year old personal assistant/researcher and single mom who falls for her middle-aged boss, James) is compelling, funny, and also somewhat
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That This by Susan HoweNew Directions, 2010
What is there to say about death, about absence and loss and the space death makes in life? “Starting from nothing with nothing when everything else has been said,” Howe writes, early in “The Disappearance Approach,” an essay about the sudden death of her husband, Peter Hare (11). Then she quotes Sarah Edwards, writing to
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How to Read the Air by Dinaw MengestuRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2010
What I like most about this book is how concerned it is with stories as such, with lies and fictions. Jonas Woldemariam has a degree in English and a foreign-sounding last name: it’s the name, he thinks, that got him a full-time job as a receptionist/factotum at a refugee resettlement center after a string of
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The Quickening Maze by Adam FouldsPenguin, 2010 (Originally Jonathan Cape, 2009)
In the June 28, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, James Wood started a review of this book by calling it “richly sown with beauty,” then going on to call Foulds’s novel “a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose.” High praise, and
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Great House by Nicole KraussW.W. Norton & Company, 2010
Great House starts off confusing and compelling: “All Rise,” the first chapter, opens like this: Talk to him. Your Honor, in the winter of 1972 R and I broke up, or I should say he broke up with me. (3) As the narrator continues we learn more about her: her career as a writer, her