Eh. A stylized Victorian-ish, WWII-era horror story that takes place on an obscure Welsh island. The book uses a vintage-photo conceit, which I find slightly takes me out of the narrative. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a mating of literature and graphic design that I’ve really loved. Kind of quirky and charming, but I didn’t really care and could have easily have not finished it.
So this is silly but I burst into tears on page three of Between You and Me, a new novel from Portland author Scott Nadelson, at the totally ordinary moment when protagonist Paul Haberman meets the woman he’s going to marry, a divorced mother of two. Paul is a single man living in Manhattan in […]
Well, Death in Spring is the most fabulously gruesome and disturbing book I’ve read in a while. It’s the last novel by Spanish writer Merce Rodoreda, originally published in 1986 in the Catalan language, translated into English in 2009 and published by Open Letter books. The book is an allegory for life in Spain under […]
I have just completed my fourth re-reading of Lilith’s Brood by Octavia E. Butler, also known as the Imago Trilogy or the Xenogenesis Trilogy, one of my all-time favorite works of science fiction, an eye-popping, queasy, deeply uncomfortable imagining of the issues that would arise if the human race were sexually absorbed by aliens. The […]
There was a desperately unhappy and bored time in my life when I learned to draw the map of America freehand, all the states named, in the right places, mostly in the right shape; the line of the Mississippi helping to define the erratic edge of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana; the jigsaw of the […]
This book, translated from the French, is a “voluntary intoxication protocol,” in which Spanish drag-king activist and cultural theorist Beatriz Preciado takes testosterone off-label for 200-something days, as a strategy of resistance towards the involuntary intoxication of what she calls the “pharmacopornographic” regime. It’s a memoir, a terrifying and brilliant work of cultural deconstruction, and […]
Abe, Kobo, The Secret Rendezvous
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Americanah
Ballentine, Poe, Things I Like About America
Barker, Pat, Regeneration Trilogy
Bechdel, Alison, Are You My Mother?
Blasim, Hassan, The Corpse Exhibition
Brown, Rebecca, The Gifts of the Body
Bulaweyo, NoViolet, We Need New Names
Burns, Charles, X'ed Out Trilogy
Butler, Octavia, The Xenogenesis Trilogy
Calloway, Marie, what purpose did i serve in your life
Delaney, Samuel R, Dhalgren
Duong Thu Huong, The Paradise of the Blind
Greenwell, Garth, What Belongs to You
Griffith, Nicola, Hild
Hamid, Mohsin, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Hollinghurst, Alan, The Line of Beauty
Jemisin, N.K., The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Jones, Alden, Unaccompanied Minors
Jones, Edward P., The Known World
Krasznahorkai, Laszlo, Seiobo There Below
Kundera, Milan, Laughable Loves
LeGuin, Ursula K., The Left Hand of Darkness
Lem, Stanislas, Fiasco
Mahfouz, Naguib, The Cairo Trilogy
Mazza, Cris, Something Wrong With Her
Nadelson, Scott, Between You and Me
Platonov, Andrei, The Foundation Pit
Preciado, Beatriz, Testo Junkie
Pym, Barbara, Quartet in Autumn
Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping
Rodoreda, Merce, Death in Spring
Sayers, Dorothy, Gaudy Night
Shakur, Assata, An Autobiography
Spanbauer, Tom, I Loved You More
Ulinich, Anya, Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel
Wallace, David Foster, Infinite Jest
West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
An Anthology of Clouds
Ouch, damning with faint praise (and short reviews). I agree that generally the graphic design/literature fusion generally falls flat but in this case it did not distract me that much. I thought it really picked up towards the end and tied the story together nicely. Not the best literature in the world by any means but an interesting semi-original plot that I found to be an enjoyable romp that did keep me reading until the end.