fiction
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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 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 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 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…
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Review of Penguin Island by Anatole France
A surprisingly lackluster fantastical satire from Anatole France, the Nobel winner who brought us dozens of French classics. Of the books of his which I’ve read, this might be the weakest in my opinion. Whereas Thais’s prose sparkled like Flaubert’s, the writing here is safer. There are moments of great…
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Review of Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas by Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño releases another posthumous book from beyond the grave. More Bolaño is welcome in this day and age, but each time it happens I recall that 2666 was his crowning achievement. How many more manuscripts did he leave in the desk drawers? This book, along with the Spirit of Science…
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Review of Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
A challenging, vengeful, manic, weird, gloriously random, obscure panegyric. A dystopian, war-like, anti-war novel. The Polish Gravity’s Rainbow, rendered less comprehensible via translation. There is still a lot to gain, absorb and relish about this book, even if every other sentence goes in one ear and out the other. The…
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Review of Tales by H.P. Lovecraft
I read this volume long ago. I have since replaced it with a more comprehensive collection of Lovecraft’s works. This seems like a cash-grab by Library of America, rather than a proper treatment of this writer’s stories. You can find a cheaper, larger complete tales edition by Chartwell classics. It’s…
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Review of The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem
After Lethem’s recent novel The Feral Detective, I didn’t know what to expect. This is an unconventional post-apocalyptic novel. Contrary to the blurb, I would not call it dystopian. Apart from the metafictional antics of its screenwriter main character, it comes alive with humorous anachronisms, some subtle social commentary, stock…
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Review of The Girl I Left Behind by Shūsaku Endō
This was a devastating novel. Not only was the female character a good character, but the way she is portrayed did not seem as unrealistic as it might have played out in a film or more conventional novel. The way Endo described the novel in his Afterward as a youthful…
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Review of Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
Should Roth’s novels be lumped together with other transgressive works such as Vollmann’s Royal Family or anything by the Marquise de Sade? Most often they are not. Frequently, they are labeled as masterpieces, or literary fiction of the award-winning variety. Whereas, Vollmann’s far superior novel abovementioned is regarded by some…
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Review of Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
I’m surprised that Viking listed this as a children’s literature. There’s nothing risque in it of course, and it is structured a little like Alice in Wonderland, but I think it will appeal to both children and adults with its playful style and malleable language. There are a lot of…
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Review of The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
No matter how unfinished this may be, it is nonetheless a book DFW spent years on. How much vaster, greater, or more polished it might have become had he seen it to completion is inestimable. But as it stands, it is impressive in a number of ways. At bottom a…
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Review of Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe
Sequel to Wolfe’s bizarre The Borrowed Man. Both orchestrated typical sleights of hand on my psyche. It is possible to get immersed in the surface-level narrative of a man who gets checked out from the library which is his institution of residence as a re-cloned mystery writer. Adventure ensures. But…
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Review of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
It is very unlikely that anyone would be able to articulate as well as Henry James himself did his intentions and method of writing The Portrait of a Lady in his New York Edition Preface, which was included in my Penguin edition. For this reason I recommend the edition over…
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Review of Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
Beginning a series of reviews I will do for Murakami, though I’m arriving late to the party, what with the plethora of reviews out there. I’ve been a fan since high school and through college. His short stories have a very different feel than his novels in my opinion. With…
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Review of The Gray Prince by Jack Vance
The Gray Prince is not advanced Vance, but it fulfills many of the checklist items one comes to expect from the GM of fantasy: weird creatures, oddball characters, absurd names, made-up vocabulary, un-subtle satire, hilarious high jinx, and luscious alien scenery. One of the most inventive pulp writers around, Vance’s…
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Review of The Lucky Star by William T. Vollmann
Another Vollmann mega-tome. Having read Royal Family and Butterfly Stories, I am not sure this volume adds too much to the prostitution-focused body of work. He covers a lot of the same ground, albeit from a different angle. I’ve reviewed the other 2 works above at length so won’t reiterate…
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Review of The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, #2) by Robert Jordan
Book 2 of the WoT focuses more on characters than plot, compared to the first, and still suffers from #1 New York Times Bestseller prose syndrome, plot conveniences, and a steep learning curve. Nonetheless, it is a closer look at Jordan’s insanely detailed universe, with in-depth character explorations, classic tropes…
L. S. Popovich 