Tag: books
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Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Let’s start by noting that O’Farrell authored Hamnet, which was made into a 2025 motion picture. As for Land, it was The Week Magazine’s Novel of the Week in its June 26, 2026, edition. So, both writer and book have had success commercially and critically. The Week specifically calls out the 25 page section of…
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Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
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…
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The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
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’…
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The Correspondent, An Epistolary Novel
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is an epistolary novel (written in letters and documents [newspaper articles, journal entries, email, etc.] and today includes social media and other documentation.) Think Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, or more recently Bridgette Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding or The Color Purple by Alice Walker (a girl’s…
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A Break: Nonfiction Well Worth Reading
As a change of pace I searched my bookshelf for one of 2 books I was given when working as a business consultant and during my several trips to India where our company had a dozen or so technology clients. So for more than a dozen years, Indian Summer, The Secret History of the End…
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Transcription, a novel by Ben Lerner
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,…
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This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
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…
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About Grace, A Novel by Anthony Doerr
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…
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Rabih Alamenddine and the “True, True” truth about his National Book Award novel.
“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…
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Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Some time ago I posted a review of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It was a cautionary post that suggested the content, and especially its treatment of women – while always wrong – was now so far beyond the norms of decency that his approach and his writing might be justifiably dismissed. It’s misogynistic, often horrifically…
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