In this novel, our lead character is youngish woman living in Paris when her husband is arrested and jailed for fencing photographs. As she begins to restructure her life, she takes up with an older writer figure and his wife and becomes unhealthily enmeshed in their lives, to the point that when her husband is released from prison, it’s not clear what she will do or even what she should do. Jean Rhys is an interesting figure especially in regards to this story. She is […]
A Hidden Gem
I don’t know much about Olive Moore. She was a woman in her mid-20s from England who wrote four short books (three novels and one nonfiction) and then stopped writing. These books all came out in the late 1920s through the mid-1930s. I found her via a Goodreads post on an alternative Modernist canon. Book 1: Celestial Seraglio 4/5 stars This novel takes place in a Belgian convent school and the primary actors in the book are the children in the school and the nuns. There […]
I have seen 5 bears in Shenandoah. Suck it Bill Bryson!
This book is really funny. Unlike A Short History of Nearly Everything which is also great, this audiobook wasn’t read by Bryson. There were still a few moments where I laughed so loudly my girlfriend asked me if everything was ok. There’s one line where a deeply unpleasant woman steals a Hostess cake from Bryson’s deeply unpleasant trailmate. “Before he could react and smite her dead….” or something like that that made me laugh so hard. This book is similar to Into the Wild if you haven’t […]
An Update to “We Should all be Feminists”
This letter to a friend acts as an update to “We Should All Be Feminists.” In some ways, it covers a lot of the same examples, ideas, and subjects, but it also adds in some oblique references to the 2016 presidential election in the US and also provides some various kinds of intersectionality (specifically toward race and class). One of the things that I think this tract does really well is heavily emphasize the process aspect of Feminism. For a lot popular discussions of Feminism, […]
She would listen in silence, if not quite in agreement
This is collection of four novellas by the Australian writer Christina Stead. I read her novel The Man who Loved Children last year and loved it. Most of her books are 500 plus pages, so it was nice to find four short ones bundled together. The Puzzleheaded Girl This story sort of starts off like an episode of Mad Men with four young business guys breaking off from their old company to form a new company that does….generic business stuff. As they move into the new […]
Sitting on a French Bench
I think I would be pretty mad if a monster who is deservedly a pariah bought the rights to my award winning play. Yasmina Reza had the unfortunate circumstances of having her play The God of Carnage bought up by Roman Polanski and turned into a movie. Anyway, this is an earlier novel that starts with an almost 50 sadsack of a writer fresh off a divorce and nursing a recent glaucoma diagnosis that could leave him blind in one of his eyes. He is thinking […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 359
- 360
- 361
- 362
- 363
- …
- 402
- Next Page »