All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg is the story of the Tuchman family, told over one hot New Orleans day, while the patriarch, Victor, lies unconscious in a hospital bed. I finished this book weeks ago and have not been able to write a review. It isn’t that I didn’t like this book but it’s also not that I did like this book. Attenberg is a talented writer and All This Could Be Yours is a competently written book. It’s more… well, years […]

Normally I try to only post positive reviews here, because who wants to be the person putting more negativity into the world, especially in the current moment?  But I am way behind on reviews so I will say: I did not like this book.  This is probably because I am a philistine.  Roxane Gay loved it!  So did NPR!  And the New York Times! Jami Attenberg’s All This Could Be Yours is the story of a family ruled by Victor Tuchman, a rich, awful man […]

It’s always a bit of a crapshoot when I purchase a book at the airport. This one jumped out at me because I lived in NYC for seven years, and because I find the 20s and 30s fascinating. The book is based on the real-life Mazie Gordon, although it isn’t an actual biography. It’s fiction, a collection ostensibly based on Ms. Gordon’s journal. The author Jami Attenberg employs an interesting method to tell the story: the reader is the ‘author’, to a degree. We read Mazie’s […]