I honestly thought this play was going to be about a middle-aged woman taking care of a bunch of children. And I guess it kind of is, in a way. Instead, it’s about a turn of the 20th century Southern family squabbling over inheritance, business interests, and their own truly awful natures. In the movie version, which I have not seen, Bette Davis plays the lead role of the sister who sort of tries to hold it all together. The plot involves the family yelling […]
Bark bark bark bark bark
Lorrie Moore is an elder stateswoman of contemporary literature. Her two story collections Self-Help and Birds of America are two of my favorite story collections ever. She is in the age of Vintage Contemporaries with the zany covers where everybody had a recent MFA and it was the 80s and we were reading about divorce and affairs. And Huzzah! This is not the same thing. In fact, this is a pretty weak collection all around. I couldn’t find a single story I could get behind in this […]
One Flew Over the Catcher’s Rye
I know about this author because she worked at bars and restaurants in my girlfriend’s college town. And so when her second novel came out this summer, we went to a reading. The second novel was pretty good. A little light, but otherwise interesting. I also really like sour, not super likeable narrators. So this story, then, which is a richer novel in general, and has a sympathetic but considerably malcontent narrator works for me. In addition, since this is about teenage boy in a […]
In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby, a lull.
Ru is a short, ruminative novel about a Vietnamese refugee to Canada who is now raising her two sons in a strange, hybrid world. The novel exists in multiple worlds. As the title even tells you, ru means either a lullaby, as in a lullaby to her young sons, to her childhood, to the end of a culture or a set of cultural experiences now long asleep. In French, ru means a small river, as in a stream or a digression or a diversion. It […]
Canadian Goonies
It’s Goonies cause there’s a weird ghost type thing and a spooky hand and teenagers. But it’s Canadian, because it’s Canadian, and it’s about feelings. This should have really been called Friends with a Boy and a Girl, because that’s actually what happens. This is a short graphic novel about a girl named Maggie who is about to have her first day of high school. Like every other YA (graphic) novel, her dad is the police chief and her mom has run away. She’s got […]
History has failed us, but no matter.
It took me 200-300 pages before I think I understood the opening of the novel, which is the title of this post. It felt tritely deep, or falsely deep. But it makes sense now that I have the full scope of the novel. I would have to imagine I won’t read a better novel published this year, this year. I might very well read better novels, but this could very well be the best novel published in the year 2017. The novel itself spans eight […]
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