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By the end of the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow, Amateur Reader led me to wonder how sustainable the voice of Jacques Deza would be through the remaining two volumes. Could this stream of consciousness, of endless hesitation and qualification, continue for hundreds more pages? Was it not too exhausting? The stream does [...] I usually skip posting on the lighter and/or sillier reading I do, but this week I’m on vacation, which should be a lighter and/or sillier time. And when I read Jasper Fforde’s latest installment in the Thursday Next series last week, I was really struck by how much I still liked it, how much [...] Shann Ray’s debut short story collection American Masculine, recently published by Graywolf Press and winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize, has a number of similarities to The Lives of Rocks, at least on the surface. The stories in both books take place in the American West and have a decidedly American [...] The last (and first) book I read by Javier Marías, Voyage Along the Horizon*, ended by with a statement that the novel-in-the-novel never should have been published or even read by anyone, much less me. The first volume of Your Face Tomorrow, Fever and Spear, begins with a not dissimilar warning: One should never [...] Full disclosure: I’ve never met Antanas Sileika, but I’m friends with his son. In Underground, Antanas Sileika tells the story of a group of people that, if it was ever really known in the West, is by now mostly forgotten. This both lends power to his story and at the same time causes a [...] Porn star. Bandleader’s girlfriend. Deliverywoman. Cat owner. Alcoholic. Dancing rat. Magician. These are a random selection of the Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls in Alissa Nutting’s collection of short stories. Don’t be fooled—even the ones that sound normal aren’t. Take “Deliverywoman.” The narrator of this story would have a fairly normal day job, [...] In his review of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Matt Rowan wrote: This latter tale is the kind of story I wish I’d written (but didn’t / can’t), because it so perfectly encapsulates all those ideas of contemporary pluralism and social equity of modern liberalism, and the realistic challenges of actually understanding someone [...] Matt Rowan of Bob Einstein’s Literary Equations broke my rules when he challenged me to read some contemporary literature, but with a local hook I decided to go with it. Good move: Chicago writer Patrick Somerville’s collection of short stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, couldn’t have impressed me more. The writing is [...] I had suspected a while back that Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was exactly the kind of “program fiction” I would like, and after Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes gushed about it over the summer I said, “Boom! It will be mine!” It [...] Ryu Murakami’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era, translated by Ralph McCarthy, is the first novel of his I’ve read since, years ago, I gave three of his older works a shot. Almost Transparent Blue, Coin-Locker Babies, and Sixty-Nine were all, as I remember, bizarre and grotesque works largely about alienation. So is this [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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