A View of the Harbour – 4/5 stars In this smallish novel, we visit a seaside town in southern England in years briefly after WWII. We get a whole cast of different characters, a local artist, a local writer, a single mother, a war widow, a doctor, and town drunk, and various other figures that come and go into the narrative. There is not a story as such, so much as how the various figures in the town interplay, interact and go about their business. […]
Finally getting through a few story collections I have been picking at and one brand new one.
American Gothic Tales; American Supernatural Tales; Her Body and Other Parties; Honeydew by Joyce Carol Oates; ST Joshi; Carmen Maria Machado; Edith Pearlman
American Gothic Tales – Ed. Joyce Carol Oates 5/5 Stars Joyce Carol Oates knows her stuff. Her introduction to this collection her focus on the Gothic as the selection process makes this an incredibly satisfying collection because it’s not all one type of story. So while on the one had you do in fact get a bunch of ghost stories, you also get stories that are eerie or disturbing or full of murder, and you get stories that are off-putting but not directly scary stories, […]
Two books I don’t think I could even begin to build a bridge between
The Diving Pool – 2/5 stars Of course the issue with any collection of fiction where the works weren’t intended to be placed side by side is that you are left holding the reins as to how they might possibly be connected. All three of these “novellas” (they are definitely just longish short stories) have a spare detached narrator focused mostly on observing than acting. All three have the same kind of spare language that other of her works are known for. And while “The […]
Queen of the Danged
Another couple months pass and I read another book from the series I keep trying to convince myself I am going to stop. Apparently I am going to be really mad when I get to the bad ones. This is not one of the bad ones, in fact, it’s a really good one. The overarching plot is still a little silly and I actually wish the series would stay small, where it’s best ,but it’s trying to be big. So Lestat is a rock star […]
It’s hard to overstate how beautifully understated this (all his) novel(s) is.
I was following the Nobel Prize speculation with some real interest in the last few weeks. Very few people on the message board I frequent mentioned Kazuo Ishiguru as a possible winner this year, and even in any year. He is one of my favorite British writers and the novels of his I’ve read rank among my very favorite, especially Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. I also really enjoyed The Buried Giant and When We Were Orphans. I will likely […]
Full Disclosure
So full disclosure is that I know the author. We went to grad school together and used to play darts in the TA shared office space. He once stole a joke from me and put it in his first book. But luckily I like his stories. This is a really funny, incredibly off-kilter collection of short stories. It’s hard to categorize the stories themselves because they all involve a level of absurdity and playfulness and involve such a wide variety of subjects. The defining feature […]
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