…you don’t know what mothers do when they can’t stop crying…. This is a delightfully gloomy Norwegian novel about tragedy, death, and loss of one’s treasure. You know you’re off to a good start with a sentence like this: Jenny Brodal had not had a drink in nearly twenty years. She opened a bottle of Cabernet and poured herself a large glass. Jenny is 75 and her daughter Siri is throwing her a birthday party at their summer home, Mailund, on a winding, misty coast […]
Must-Read Sci-Fi
One of my favorite books of 2014 was Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. It’s a sci-fi novel that won pretty much every prize awarded for that genre and features one of the coolest protagonists I’ve ever encountered in literature: Breq, an “ancillary” or corpse soldier who has been untethered from the collective consciousness of her ship but retains amazing physical and cognitive powers. As one character states in book 2, “[Breq] is pretty fucking badass.” In book 1, Breq was on a mission to reach the […]
Chasing Ghosts
What once appeared to be a simple legacy — a grandfather who escaped, who created a better life away from the European killing fields — became a story of a world upended, a life set aside, a narrative rerouted. This non-fiction work by journalist Sarah Wildman is not the usual account of the Holocaust. After her grandfather’s death, she found a trove of letters written to him from the girlfriend he left behind in Austria after the 1938 Anschluss. Her grandfather Karl Wildman, as the […]
“Oddly Modern Fairy Tales”
The Fourth Pig was originally published in the 1930s and is a reflection of the tense economic/political climate of the late interwar period. Although I had never heard of her, Mitchison’s writing was well known and popular in the 1930s. Her personal history as related by Marina Warner in the introduction marks her as an unusual woman for her time and quite outspoken in her political views. Given her leftist leanings, it is perhaps not surprising that this work in particular faded into obscurity after […]