Reviews, Top N lists, and other sundry literary stuff.
…or, what really happened in the woods that winter: In a cave in the woods in his deep, dark lair through the long, cold winter sleeps a great brown bear. Cuddled in a heap with his eyes shut tight he sleeps through the day he sleeps through the night. The cold winds howl and the […]
A few thoughts as I step away from Theodore Rex: (1) “Teddy” was a really and truly fascinating character and (like him or not) an important figure in American history. (2) Given when I was reading this (i.e., more/less at the height of the health care reform debates of the Obama administration), it gives me […]
The write-up on the back of the edition of An Obedient Father that I read describes Sharma’s protagonist as a bit of a Dostoevskyian anti-hero. This makes sense: Sharma gives us a corrupt, alcoholic, child-molesting bureaucrat as the vehicle through which most of the story is told. And–call me old fashioned–this makes the story just […]
When I read Angela Carter, I imagine her as the literary grandmother to someone like Kelly Link 1. There’s an eccentric tone of fantasy, an unabashed outlandishness and roguish word-play; a challenge runs through the narrative as a thread, sometimes cleverly concealed at the seams and sometimes out in front like so much gaudy embroidery. […]
Micro review: in Plays Well With Others, Gurganus has a great, somewhat lyrical style that propels the tapestry of vignettes that comprise this novel; that said, he tips his narrative hand in the first 30 pages and you spend the next 450 pages playing a sort of emotional defense. A few miscellaneous points: (1) […]
In lieu of an actual review (short version: it was good but a little challenging and took at least 2 reads to “get it”), a couple of observations about China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station: (1) On the appeal of steampunk: I remain convinced (and in large part because of this book) that the big appeal […]
In the August 10, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes the following in his essay “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism“: One of George Orwell’s finest essays takes Charles Dickens to task for his lack of “constructive suggestions.” Dickens was a powerful critic of Victorian England, a […]
Arranged chronologically from 1955 through 2001, Dozois’ anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, is a tightly-themed collection of science fiction shorts. It’s a good overview of the terraforming subject’s treatment within the genre but the anthology seems to lack any stand-out stories – there are no great masterpieces in here. Which is not to say […]
Eclipse 1 is a good-not-great anthology of speculative (née “science”) fiction and fantasy (rather: “new weird”) short stories edited by Jonathan Strahan. My “good-not-great” may be stemming from my disappointment that there was more “new weird”/fantasy than there was science fiction 1 but there were still quite a few “big wins” in the pile that […]
In lieu of a actual substantive review, a few notes about George Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation: (1) A typical Saunders collection. This means you’re getting some delightfully weird prose but it also means you’re getting (more than?) a few tales oblique enough to blot out the sun. Which is not to comment on whether/not those […]