Reviews
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Review of A Spy in the Panopticon by Damian Murphy
I wish I could find the edition pictured on Goodreads. I only had access to the first part: Spy in the Panopticon, which by itself is another stunning work of the imagination from Damian Murphy. In this one especially, the seed of an obscure metaphysics seems to be present. There…
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Review of The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George
I admire the author’s boldness. There is a lack of restraint in the freewheeling bizarro-ideas. The stories function without character development, plot twists, or reflection. They are fast-paced, bare-bones cobbled-together surrealist evocations of modern day discontent, obsession and sexual fantasy. Shock and awe, surprise and delight, but plainly stated, divested…
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Review of Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
The first thing you’ll notice about this book is the unique design. The black-stained page edges and the reflective hardcover. The high-quality paper. These are the things which lend themselves to a unique reading experience, and that is what it is. Our Tragic Universe contained most of what I love…
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Review of Reality Testing (Sundown, #1) by Grant Price
Reality Testing is a colorful novel, generously long, pumped full of so much creativity that the experience of reading it can only be compared to an overdose of science-fiction brand narcotics. Blending a complex web of illusion and reality, with prose that is so tight, sleek, polished, and chromium-plated, it…
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Review of Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
Unlike Ryu Murakami’s transgressive works, this small book lacks polish. It deals with the immature, shallow concerns of its adolescent characters with stark, unapologetic realism. Edgy in the extreme, but lacking depth of any appreciable kind, it reads quickly and has all of the trappings of a bestselling Japanese alternative…
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Review of You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon
So far, I’ve enjoyed the short stories of Chaon more than the novels. The novels stick with you, though. He might be compared to Lorrie Moore for the crystalline style, but his depiction of American life verges on disturbing at times, and reveals the undercurrent of our repressed age, bringing…
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Review of The Seducer by Jan Kjærstad
Jonas Swallows the Whale. This is a cathedral of words. Cocooned within these pages is a living organism. In preparations for metamorphosis, the encasing structure takes on increasing complexity, immersing the reader in its development, through stages, through time, the creature inside is the main character, Jonas, but he is…
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Review of The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 1: The Faust Act by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie (Illustrations), Matt Wilson (Colorist), Clayton Cowles
“The Wicked+ The Divine: The Faust Act” is an interesting opening act. The concept might be its strongest selling point. The premise that 12 gods from different pantheons are reincarnated every 90 years can lead to a lot of plot development. These reincarnations will then die 2 years later. I…
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Review of The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin
The Magic Kingdom is bound to arouse mixed feelings from many readers. If you approach it as a playground for linguistic experimentation, it succeeds in entertaining. From most other perspectives, I felt, it failed to compel me. The forceful writing Elkin is known for is here in evidence, but the…
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Review of We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse, #1) by Dennis E. Taylor
It didn’t live up to the hype. For me at least. Many other people will enjoy this. Every time I was introduced to an interesting, high-brow scientific concept, I was cringing at the corny humor. The main issue is Bob, the narrator/ commentator, giving a peanut gallery run down of…
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Review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
I didn’t laugh. And it was quickly forgotten. Kundera knew how to write. (I speak in the past tense because he is now 90 years old and I wonder how much writing he’s doing nowadays.) But he chose to write about things I find it very hard to care about.…
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Review of Vlad by Carlos Fuentes
Fuentes serves up a vampire yarn in a minimalist style. Compared to many of his other works, this one is straightforward, short, and perhaps a departure from his ordinary fare. What begins as a hilarious and subtly creepy familial tale, complete with comedic and eccentric descriptions of a Count morphs…
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Review of The Other City by Michal Ajvaz
A harmless and creative work, quirky and European in flavor, but lacking the depth of the shameless blurbs hailing Ajvaz as the Czech Kafka Wait, never mind. This is a dream book, a better than average Surrealist romp. Relatively flat, but well-animated, colorful, goofy, surprising, and atmospheric. Superimposition plays a…
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Review of Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu
Monsu held the butterfly uterus in the open palm of his right hand. Its skin fibers gently pulsed. In the end, it took flight, not through the mechanical beating of lepidoptera, but by undulations within the gelatinous medium, the way transparent beings on the bottom of the ocean proceed dreamlike…
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Review of Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
One’s enjoyment of this collection may depend on one’s enthusiasm for wordplay. There is a significant amount of utterly clever portmanteuing. Buried beneath the lexical prestidigitation is a penchant for unconventional storytelling. Combining homages to classical mythology with post-modern shenanigans, Barth’s creative use of the English language is a rare…
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Review of The Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka
With the Book of Human Insects, Tezuka’s appeal is reaches new heights. He compressed an incredibly fascinating character study into a short space. It is what he did with MW, but you’ll see even more compression here. One eternally gets the sense that Tezuka suffered from too many ideas. He…
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Review of And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
There are so many versions of this book on Goodreads because this book has been reprinted so many times. It’s one of those classics, like War and Peace, that endures. It is a multi-volume epic, and aside from its intimidating size, how is an American reader supposed to choose an…
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Review of The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei
This was one of my favorite modern Chinese novels. Instead of dealing with the horrors of war and destruction of families and bureaucracies, as in Mo Yan and Yan Lianke’s works, this was a breath of fresh air. It read much more like Japanese fiction in its depiction of an…
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Review of The Paper Door and Other Stories by Naoya Shiga
Naoya Shiga’s short story collection, translated by Lan Dunlop is a condensation of a career, a well-translated, well-written, well-selected enticing collection. In Japan, Shiga is hailed as “god of the novel.” His only novel-length work was the morose A Dark Night’s Passing, but in Japanese, apparently, the term ‘novel’ refers…
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Review of An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe
“Money is an evil guest.” Gene Wolfe can write in any genre he desires, I suppose. This book was a noir with subtle science fiction elements. The blurbs and book jacket call it Lovecraftian horror, which is a lie. You can expect 95% dialogue, well-polished, for about 250 pages, and…
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Review of Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
Calvino’s lectures, prepared but not delivered late in his career, are just as thought-provoking as his fiction. He discusses some key, broad aspects of literature, and his personal discoveries of certain propulsive forces in writing. His discussion of Multiplicity I found most interesting, and the way he categorized encyclopedic and…
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Review of Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
Polishing off the remainder of DFW’s works has been a treat this year. I began by listening to the author-read audiobook, then picked up the paperback where the audio left off. What an astounding journalist he was. “Consider the Lobster” is an in-depth look at a lobster festival. “Big Red…
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Review of Literature™ by Guillermo Stitch
Guillermo Stitch is starting off strong. This and his more recent Lake of Urine showcase a singular ability to incorporate dark comedy, magical realism, and slick writing chops. This short novel is easy to read, but deep enough to keep me thinking about the world and characters afterward. The onset…
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Review of Three Fantasies by John Cowper Powys
In the Afterward, Cavaliero draws a lot of biographical significance out of the farcical improvisation of the juvenilia of Powys in his dotage. This Beckettian collection of three novellas is both saddening and quirky At the forefront are confrontations with physical embodiments of Death. The skepticism of an animist, the…
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Review of The Pleasures of Queuing by Erik Martiny
The second book by Martiny I’ve read. This one was very different from Night of the Long Goodbyes. Both were singular in their content, and contained a mix of traditional and non-traditional techniques. I would call this a hysterical picaresque novel infused with mesmeric weirdness, peppered with quirky satirical aplomb…
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Review of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson
A passing acquaintance with Samuel Johnson will reveal that the man could write splendidly. He possessed, by all accounts, an unapproachable intellect. His literary works are reminiscent of Voltaire’s: witty, erudite, vast, and infinitely readable. His travel accounts and the biography by Boswell are considered paragons of their genre. Sadly,…
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Review of Vaseline Buddha by Young-moon Jung
What a fascinating read!I’m going to unpack it, but there’s no way to properly convey the captivating reading experience this author provided me. Undergo the trial of reading it. It’s well worth your time. Dalkey missed their chance at publishing this, and I’m grateful to Deep Vellum for putting it…
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Review of Lord Valentine’s Castle (Lord Valentine, #1) by Robert Silverberg
A grand and imaginative adventure on an alien planet. Our prototypical hero has been transplanted from his rightful throne, and he must rise from rags to power through the sheer will contained in his magical dream-enhancing powers and his innate juggling ability. He will gather a band of weird followers,…
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Review of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
I could try to compose a lengthy review, but the essential points are in the product description. You don’t need to know more than that to determine if this book is for you. Combined with the page count, it shouldn’t be a difficult decision. I will just say that it…
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Review of Dragonflight (Dragonriders of Pern, #1) by Anne McCaffrey
The start of a well-known series. While the writing was on par with many fantasies I’ve read, the characters and setting did not amaze me. It is dragon-centric, so heavy with dragon-lore and dragon-activities and dragon-relationships and dragony stuff that it left me curious about the characters. For all of…
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Review of Eggs, Beans And Crumpets by P.G. Wodehouse
Wodehouse may be the most comic writer from his time. This book, in a consummately British, very moist audiobook reading, was constantly hilarious. This author’s use of similes might be unequaled. The wordy acrobatics he pulls off juxtaposes a mundane setting for bumbling characters. The prevalent theme is money, and…
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Review of Dali – The Paintings by Robert Descharnes
This is the best collection of Dali’s paintings I have ever found. It has dozens of massive full color, full page prints. It does not contain all of them, but several hundred works are represented. To gain a deep understanding of Dali’s symbolism you will also need to read supplemental…
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Review of Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
I have trouble motivating myself to write about the works of Haruki Murakami. The fact of the matter is, I have read all of his work in English, I love it, I know it has flaws, and I don’t care. He has a legion of followers, rivaling Neil Gaiman, but…
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Review of Great Short Works Of Henry James by Henry James
Without further reading, a comprehensive view of James cannot be gained from 6 of his short novels. He is one of those authors: namely, no matter how many of his books you power through, there is always an infinite amount of reading left to do, like Trollope and Dickens. Your…
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Review of Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace
Not sure if I’d recommend this one. It’s DFW, and yes, it’s witty, acerbic, articulate, et. al. but the items under discussion did not engage me in the way that Lobster, and Supposedly Fun Thing did in their turn. I’d therefore call this his least successful collection. They padded the…
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Review of Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Earthling is a very absorbing and unconventional coming-of-age story. It is told from the perspective of an eleven year-old girl and then shifts to later in her life. Broken up into two perspectives, they are both profoundly effective and deeply disturbing. I found the novel to be an exploration of…
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Review of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass
Reads like an appendix to The Tunnel. For Gass enthusiasts, it represents a departure into more experimentation than is really useful. Plenty of meaning can be drawn out of his alliterative sentences, but untangling the twelve fonts and piecing together the abstruse suggestions takes work. The entertainment value is limited.…
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Review of Collected Early Stories by John Updike
This one surprised me. It is a luxurious and splendid collection. Well worth the money. My first Updike. Reading it resulted in me buying 12 of his books. For some reason, he has acquired a reputation recently, and most of the chatter about his work takes the form of complaints.…
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Review of The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson
Like Gogol’s “The Nose,” but extrapolated, updated, crafted in a deliberately daring manner, modernized, and covering eggs, spermatozoan, blood, milk, fat, nerves, and more. Casting off abstract concepts like character, dialogue, and plot, S. J. focuses on the human body as an object of dream, fetish, and fascination. Implementing her…
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Review of The Tunnel by William H. Gass
What is this monstrous thing in the shape of a novel? this corpulent, unkind, savage, lexical anomaly? Maybe not a good gift for your grandmother for Hanukkah. The first thing you might notice, if you’re paying attention, is Gass’s sentence architecture: most of his prose waterfalls are extended metaphors woven…
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Review of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
** spoiler alert ** This book is an experience. It is also a comment on society. I will try and outline some of the value I have found in this book. Consider giving it multiple readings. What is most striking about the main character is that his self, often formless,…
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Review of Opalescence: The Middle Miocene Play of Color by Ron Rayborne
Ron Rayborne Site: In movies, you normally get a nerd protagonist traveling through time to figure out if he can change some insignificant facet of his own life. In reality, if we ever get time travel, it will be scientists who utilize it for the purpose of saving our species…
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Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
Recommended for hardcore DFW fans. This collection is a deeply personal, scattered exhibit of loneliness, a harrowing, sad, and convincing portrayal of damaged psyches. Wit, brilliance, and exuberance are all evident in Wallace’s oeuvre, but here, must be discerned through strata of mimesis. Listening to the audiobook reading by the…
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Review of The Inverted World by Christopher Priest
This was like China Mieville, but without the Baroque prose indulgence. Christopher Priest wrote it in an unadorned style, and the characters and world are not as unbounded by mundane constraints as the forward led me to believe. Too straightforward and not surprising enough to engage me all the way…
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Review of Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara
Hear me out.I realize Dalkey publishes challenging, subversive, and often experimental titles. I collect them. But I will be donating this one. I am sure many others will get more out of it than I. I’ve listed some observations for your deeper consideration: Basara’s existential experiment may appeal to some.…
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Review of Outlaws of the Marsh (4-Volume Boxed Set) by Shi Nai’an
I have long wanted to reread this established classic. The most complete edition I could find in print was the Chinese Classics 4-volume Edition from Foreign Language Press, weighing in at a slim 2,149 pages. Nonetheless, I would call this an un-put-downable page-turner. One of the original Proto-Wuxia novels from…
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Review of The Sea Lady by H.G. Wells
A skippable, unnecessary, and nonetheless pleasant-to-dip-into novel from Mr. Wells, who felt compulsed to reach triple digits with his belletristic novelizing. Sure, he dashed off a few masterpieces in his day, but this is not one of them. I doubt he could even recall writing it a few years later.…
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Review of The Translator’s Bride by João Reis
In prose which demands to be read quickly, the text of this novel is in constant motion. The first person narrator’s brain never stops churning. Language is the malleable medium illustrating his ecstatic imagination and superimposing it on his luscious environment. Strange observations gallop one after another in a stream of…
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Review of A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
You will notice right away Defoe’s journalistic approach, rife with supporting statistics. His powers as a writer and boldness of presentation are clearly beyond the pale. As was the case with Robinson Crusoe, he was not forthright with sources or veracity in the tale. It is often impossible to tell…
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Review of Mythago Wood (Mythago Wood, #1) by Robert Holdstock
Mythago Wood’s strength was its intense atmosphere, and the author’s use of language to build a forest in the reader’s mind. The setting is convincing, though there were distracting missteps and aggravations that had me rolling my eyes One example should suffice to make my point: One of the characters…
L. S. Popovich 