what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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See Me Improving by Travis NicholsCopper Canyon Press, 2010
I didn’t particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It’s a short book, and maybe part of my problem the…
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Spurious by Lars IyerMelville House, 2011
I’m not going to lie: I checked this book out of the library in part because of the excellent cover image, which is a photo from William Hundley’s Entoptic Phenomena series. Plus, it’s published by Melville House, a small press I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now: I’ve walked by their bookstore/office…
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A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press, 2011
In this, the third Flavia de Luce mystery (after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, both of which I read and liked last May ), we once again find ourselves in the little village of Bishop’s Lacey, which is again beset by mysterious criminal happenings.…
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World Enough by Maureen N. McLaneFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
The poems I like best in this book are the ones that deal with places, maybe because these poems are full of satisfying specificity: Vermont and its lake and gulls, Saratoga in summer rain, L.A. with its oleander and “Hockney blue” pools and, perhaps my favorite poems of all, the ones about Paris in the…
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The Lover’s Dictionary by David LevithanFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011
This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like: autonomy, n. “I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I…