Winter 2018: Books to Read and Review

Here’s a breakdown of my current stack of books to read and review. There’s a lot of interesting things on deck, including a new book by Ned Beauman and Will Self. I absolutely adored Beauman’s hilarious The Teleportation Accident, which merged H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos with 1930s Berlin, so I’m looking forward to checking out Madness Is Better Than Defeat. I’ve been reading Will Self’s Phone for the past few weeks, which is mesmerizing despite its handful of flaws. It’s frustrating because so many of the casual reviewers out there are panning this one, saying it was too difficult to get into and that they had to put it down after only a few pages. Our review will run tomorrow, which I hope gives Phone the thoughtful discussion it deserves.

Madness Is Better Than Defeat by Ned Beauman (Knopf)
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (Penguin)
Waiting for Tomorrow by Natacha Appanah (Graywolf Press)
Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ice by Anna Kavan (Penguin)
It Don’t Come Easy by Dupuy & Berberian (Drawn & Quarterly)
The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith (Viking)
Phone by Will Self (Grove Atlantic)

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Jeff Alford

Jeff Alford is a critic and book collector based in Denver, CO. He is a contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Rain Taxi Review of Books and the New Orleans Review and author of the now-retired rare books and small press blog www.theoxenofthesun.com.

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