The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]
Triptych of no real consequence
Philip Roth – The Breast 2/5 Cynthia Ozick – The Shawl 4/5 Vladimir Nabokov – The Eye 3/5 So these three short novels or novellas don’t really have much to do with one another ostensibly, but I read them one after the other on a Friday sick day and thought a little about their connections or rather what connections I might draw on them. To start, I will tell you what each one of them is about. The Shawl starts off in the […]
Winding Down
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth 4/5 Stars This is one of those books I got really excited about when I was like 20 and I bought or got ahold of and then never read. In fact, I remember sitting on my brother’s couch and reading one page and being like OH NO and not reading any more. I like Philip Roth a lot, warts and all. He’s ridiculous and writes a lot about maleness, but I am male and it sometimes connects with me. In […]
They don’t give that Pulitzer out for just anything.
American Pastoral won the pulitzer and boy oh boy it is deserved. This novel is a masterpiece of storytelling. Swede Luvov is a small town hero: star athlete, considerate son, professional Jewish American businessman, and married to a former Miss Jersey. By all accounts, he is living the American Dream, until his daughter tears the fabric of his family and life apart as an anti-war terrorist. It takes us a little while to get there though, as the novel is framed as the musings of […]