I listened to Roxane Gay read her own book, Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body. It was a soul punch. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened at a time when I was struggling with feelings about my family, or maybe it was the exact right time. Several versions of this review were only appropriate for my therapist. I am fat, and I was always going to be fat unless I either put myself on a constant, punitive diet, or devoted hours and hours of my day […]
My heart beat hard and furious against my ribs like a fist wanting to hurt
Amazon released this Kindle Single as a teaser for a forthcoming book from Joyce Carol Oates. I generally love Oates. She makes me uncomfortable in all the right ways, and reminds readers regularly that all manner of person can be a victim and all manner of person can be a predator. This is a fascinating and quick read, almost dream-like in some ways because it is first-person narrative in the head of a young man actively dissociating as a protective mechanism for seemingly numerous traumas. […]
I reject your heroine and substitute my own
Karin Slaughter is one of the very few thriller writers whose work I actually look forward to and buy on, or near, (or occasionally before, as bookstores here seem a little befuddled about embargo dates and English-language books) the official publishing date. I wasn’t a big fan of her last one, Pretty Girls, but the one before that, Cop Town, was a pretty damn good exploration of what it was like to be a woman on the police force in 1970s Atlanta. I heartily recommend […]
A Novelist’s Profound Discourse on Human Suffering
This was my first foray into the writing of Ruth Rendell, who now apparently publishes under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, and I was affected to the core by what some reviewers call her finest work. She takes the story of an outwardly successful family—a popular British author, his two beloved daughters, his caring wife—and forges a mystery so infused with sadness and psychological trauma that it can leave no reader unscathed. Gerald Candless is an imposing figure of a man—deep-voiced and towering, with leonine […]