As you can see, I didn't really like this one. I got it as part of a subscription to Open Letter press, a translation press run out of the University of Rochester that translates relatively little known authors from around the world into English and publishes good, hefty editions of them. It's a … [Read more]
That’s how confident they are. No one would dare stand in front of our house and watch us, they think.
This novel is also of a type. I don't know if you've read Jenny Offil's Dept of Speculation or Shirley Barrett's The Bus on Thursday, but both deal with the collapse of both long-term relationships, but also the collapse of long-term relationships in the swift succession of a partner leaving. In … [Read more]
The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice.
This is an interesting and touching novel by the Nobel Prize winner from 1968 Yasunari Kawabata. His win is perfectly well-deserved as he's a great writer, but I get the sense that the Nobel committee perhaps felt like they missed their chance with Junichiro Tanizaki dying a few years earlier, not … [Read more]
Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts…
This a deeply haunted book in a very disturbing (but not explicit) manner. It's a coming of age novel and it involves a teenage girl kind of maybe slowly learning that she might be Queer by watching an older woman be an older woman, treat her earnestly, treat her well, and care for her. So that's … [Read more]