This book has huge parts in it that are really really good. And in fact, her two main characters are so interesting and developed and satisfying, it’s a shame that the big flaw/issue I have with this book mars it so much. In this novel, a young Fuzhou boy living in New York City with his undocumented mother and various family and friends finds himself in the New York foster system after his mom disappears one day. Purportedly, she went to Florida for a job, […]
Early Stories
The Geranium and other stories by Flannery O'Connor
This short collection of stories by Flannery O’Connor represents her earliest works. These stories are focused on a few issues and a couple of them were even revised later on to be more complete versions in later publications. They do offer a glimpse into those concerns. Her biggest concerns throughout all her career are people who choose cruelty and decorum instead of kindness. She also loves to write about hypocrisy. In these stories, all of these different themes show up mostly in dealing with the […]
My first recollection of Timofey Pnin is connected with a speck of coal dust that entered my left eye
Here’s an older Nabokov talking about the best American novels: I show you this to get a sense of his voice and his mannerisms. In this short novel, we are introduced to a Russian professor named Timofey Pnin, who immigrated to the US to teach at a small liberal arts college in New England in the 1940s. The novel starts off with Pnin getting a train to report to a conference where he has been enlisted to give a talk. In a way not unlike To […]
It was an ugly mystery
Things you need to know about Flannery O’Connor: She died young of Lupus. She was a devout Catholic. She was Southern as hell. She lived with her mother and chose a writer’s life instead of anything personally intimate. So that said, here’s some thoughts of her stories in this collection. “Everything that Rises Must Converge” Flannery O’Connor is fascinated by the relationship between sons and mothers, especially liberal-minded sons who hold the vulgarities of the world against their poor mothers. In this story, among […]
Strays
The premise for this collection of stories is pretty interesting and right in my wheelhouse for a type of novel I often like. Emma Donoghue is mostly known for her novel Room and for good and obvious reasons. But her background as a writer in much more involved in historical fiction ala Sarah Waters. And also, she is Irish-Canadian and have a PhD, so well-researched trans-Atlantic literature is a perfect fit. I really liked her novel from this past year The Wonder and so this one was […]
He couldn’t help himself
Brandon Sanderson, man, it’s like he tried with this series to just see what would happen if you tried to answer some of the genre-bending questions leftover from Mistborn. So, like, ok, what would the world be like a few hundred years later? Oh, a mix of the Wild West and Victorian England? Well, that’s pretty cool. Bullets and allomancy is a cool combination….kind of in now, that’s neat. Cockney chicanery and US Marshall tropes….cool cool. How about three books in, we jump right back […]
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