what I’ve been reading lately:
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I, City by Pavel Brycz, trans. Joshua Cohen and Markéta HofmeisterováTwisted Spoon Press, 2006
A novel in vignettes, in prose-poems: a novel told from the viewpoint of a Czech city, and so containing flashes of the lives of its inhabitants. The city in question is Most, a mining town that was “literally relocated to get to the brown coal beneath it,” as the flap-copy explains. “Sometimes I feel like
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The Portrait of a Lady by Henry JamesModern Library, 2002 (text from the 1908 Scribner’s edition; originally Houghton Mifflin 1881)
This weekend I heard someone talk about how much she dislikes Fingersmith, because the deceit bothers her. The layers of deceit were precisely what made that book compelling for me: compelling enough to read it from start to finish on one long plane ride. But I can understand feeling that there’s something sordid about a
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Wide Awake by David LevithanAlfred A. Knopf, 2006
This book’s set in a not-too-distant future in which America, after struggling through “the Greater Depression” and fighting a failed “War to End All Wars,” has elected a gay Jewish president. Predictably, this doesn’t sit well with some people: a recount is ordered and it’s unclear as to whether the machinations of the opposition party
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Curves and Angles by Brad LeithauserAlfred A. Knopf, 2006
The pleasing poems in this book are divided into two sections, the “Curves” and “Angles” of the title, with a “Borgesian interlude” between them. The first section is more peopled than the second: as the author’s note explains, the curves “are the body’s curves,” while the angles are the “less giving lines of an inanimate
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Ommateum with Doxology by A.R. AmmonsW.W. Norton & Co., 2006 (Originally Dorrance and Company, 1955)
The preface to this edition quotes from an interview that Ammons gave in 1995: these poems, Ammons says, “are sometimes very rigid and ritualistic, formal and off-putting, but very strong.” The preface also quote from a letter Ammons wrote in 1954, in which he gives this definition of the title’s first word: “the complex eye
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London Calling by Edward BloorAlfred A. Knopf, 2006
Time-travel and lost souls and lots of Catholicism: this book could so easily be so bad, but it’s well-written and actually quite pleasing. Martin’s depressed, bullied at school and feeling pressured by his mom to live up to the reputation of his grandfather, who worked with the Kennedies. But then Martin starts having vivid dreams
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Palace of Ice by Tarjei Vesaas, trans. Elizabeth RokkanWilliam Morrow & Co., Inc., 1968 (English translation published in Great Britain in 1966)
Two girls, and a winter landscape: the hard ground, white rime, “steel-ice” and snow that blankets everything. Dream-logic, repetition, “the play between what has been and what is to come” (p 86). Reading this book makes me want to re-read Acts of Levitation by Laynie Browne, which would, I’m sure, make me want to read
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When We Were Orphans by Kazuo IshiguroAlfred A. Knopf, 2000 (originally Faber and Faber)
Narrative restraint; a narrator who’s unreliable because memory is unreliable, and memory that’s unreliable for so many reasons —distance, pride—and what happens when that unreliability affects everyday events, when it affects what happens now and not just how we remember things. This is an elegant book, a quiet book, also perhaps a sad book, in
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Venice from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregorHarvard University Press, 2006
I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press’s blog, and I was immediately won over by the old map and by that first paragraph. The book as a whole is pleasing, but not quite as pleasing as that first paragraph made me hope it would be. It’s a very well-produced book,
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Grief Lessons: Four plays by Euripides, translated by Anne CarsonNew York Review of Books, 2006
I like the lucidity of Carson’s prose, the framing essays around these plays, and the prefaces to each one: the sense of knowledge and ease and also a sly smile when she writes things like “The first eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to.” The four plays: Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos,