This powerful novel, titled Jugend auf der Landstrasse Berlin (Youth on the Road to Berlin) was published in 1932 to much acclaim but was very soon banned by the Nazi regime of WWII. Telling the story of youth gangs, many on the run from the law, welfare or the borstals. By banding together, as one such gang who call themselves the Blood Brothers does, they have a modicum of hope for survival. They are always on the move, always looking for a way to get a […]

I’ve lost count how many books by Joyce Carol Oates I have read over my lifetime (for she has been publishing nearly as long as I have been alive). She can be mesmerizing, maddening, oblique, seductive, mind-bogglingly loquacious, unrelentingly dark and naively hopeful. Often all in the same book. The sheer output this woman has is daunting, a marvel. That so many of her books or characters still inform my reading life is amazing. This book and it’s inhabitants will surely follow me for years […]

This book, by 2014’s winner of the Nobel prize for literature, is comprised of three novellas; Afterimage, Suspended Sentences and Flowers of Ruin. These are all exercises in memory, evoking a Paris of days gone past and people long gone. “The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them. I even looked for mystery where there was none.” In Afterimage, the 19-year-old narrator makes the chance acquaintance of a photographer, Jansen. Over the subsequent few months in 1963 he takes […]