I wonder what it would have been like to read Lucia Berlin in the 1970’s, as my family was driving through the western United States on various extended vacations — two parents and five kids stuffed into a green Buick … Continue reading
Brookner’s precise and darkly imaginative second novel explores, with an unstinting, dispassionate, and bone-scraping precision, the paradoxical and painful dichotomy between seeing and being seen. Fanny Hinton, a handsome and sober young woman of means living alone with the aging … Continue reading
A compact masterpiece of storytelling – gastronomical, theatrical, musical – Skylark is a composition of joy and pain, written with great heart and gentle humor, and steeped in the turn-of-the-century flavors and characters of provincial Hungarian life from a forgotten … Continue reading
Patti wanders equally and easily through dreams, memories, as well as through what we call everyday life. The immediacy of her lovely thoughts, annotations, and reflections pull us so strongly into her consciousness that we feel blessedly wrapped in a magical fabric part dream, … Continue reading
What is behind the door? Do not come to this book expecting to find easy answers to any of your tired questions about relationships, faith, poverty, love, or the meaning of life. Check your preconceptions at the door. This is the … Continue reading
by Patrick Leigh Fermor One of the finest prose stylists I’ve ever read, although it is very rich stuff. Best to pack all twenty volumes of the OED in your knapsack if you want to read this on the subway … Continue reading
This simply astonishing tour de force performance of theatre and poetry twisted into an incredibly tightly knotted/plotted novel unfolds like an extended wild, mesmerizing erotic dream. In one sense a simple murder/crime novel, Genet’s saturation of every sentence be it … Continue reading
I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but it also felt in some way like a young adult novel; it seems like a brilliant book written by a boy. And yet there are deep honest truths about love and youth … Continue reading
This books was a nice surprise. Beautifully written, energetic, intelligent, humane, thoughtful. I’m in a good mood so I’m not going to say anything bad… But if I were going to say something critical, I would only mention that the author’s/narrator’s … Continue reading
Certain novels rise up like a quiet spring from some deep well of poetry and human feeling… Continue reading