Tag: book-reviews

Ok, to start and end here’s my only comments about this novel’s structure. Angel Down is written in one sentence, and with every paragraph separated by white space on the page and every paragraph beginning with “and” which then goes on for nearly 300 pages. Not my cup of tea. As a writer Kraus might say…

I took this book up in response to having read Lerner’s short novella Transcription. A celebrated writer, Lerner’s jumping around and losing the theme and later maybe finding it again is being hailed as the new standard for the novel. Transcription has a long section about a young girl’s unwillingness to eat and her parents’…

I just finished this short novel (maybe 40,000 words in 130 pages) that’s been hailed as one of the first books to take on the issue of dependence on our phones. But it also addresses relationships and provides “dreamlike” narratives. From the Amazon introduction: “The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence,…

Krueger has, over a long career, brought the Midwest, or maybe more directly, Minnesota into the literary mainstream. His novels include his 2014 Ordinary Grace, the story of a small town and the people in it, all with larger implications for the human condition. Read it! But now, I’ve just finished his 2019 novel This…

Doerr is most recently known for his novel All the Light We Cannot See, which I’ve read and agree with the critics that it’s phenomenal accomplishment (also made into a short series for TV.) Literary, lyrical, and heartbreaking for much of the plot, a blind girl with only street memory has to overcome attacks from…

“The True, True, Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the National Book Award for fiction in 2025. Written in English, billed as a dark comedy, the novel, like so many others I’ve read from award winning authors with different ideas, jumps all over the place – although the cover blurb says “the…

I just finished reading Kaveh Akbar’s novel Martyr. My copy of book has more than 25 effusive praises from mostly (but not entirely) east or west coast reviewers. So here again I find the number a bit overstated and feel like the inclusion of all this “doth protest too much.” And yet, not all the…