The Other People / C J Tudor / Ballantine, 01/20 – $27 (Hardcover) There is something relentlessly engrossing about a mystery. The suspense, the shock, and finally the catharsis when all the pieces come together create a reading gripping experience that cannot be found elsewhere. The Other People, the most recent novel from C. J.…
The Fool and Other Moral Tales / Anne Serre, trans. by Mark Hutchinson / New Directions, 09/19 – $15 (Paperback) Repulsive, violent, confounding: that’s how I would best describe Anne Serre’s newly translated collection of short stories, The Fool. Yet Serre performs a wild alchemy within the tight confines of the three fabulous tales collected…
Disappearing Earth / Julia Phillips / Knopf, 05/2019 – $27 (Hardcover) “In Kamchatka,” Julia Phillips told the Paris Review, “you can slip between the cracks so easily.” Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth, tells the story of two young girls who get kidnapped from the Kamchatka Peninsula on the northeastern-most edge of Russia. It is a…
Valerie, or The Faculty of Dreams: A Novel / Sara Stridsberg, trans. by Deborah Bragan-Turner / FSG, 08/2019 – $27 (Hardcover) Valerie Solanas’s Wikipedia page begins: “Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist and author best known for writing the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.” It…
“Beginning with the fall of towers and ending with the emergence of a new voice, the mastery of Against Translation is clear…”
“Spectres linger in the poems of Ransom Street…”
Midterms season is probably not the best time to read an 848-page novel pertaining in no way to your exams, but the mind has curious ways of reorienting your priorities at the exact moment you most need them to remain resolute. That is the briefest explanation of how I came to read The Priory of…