Ice by Anna Kavan
★★★☆☆ Originally published fifty years ago and recently reissued in an anniversary edition with supplemental texts by Jonathan Lethem and Kate Zambreno, Anna Kavan’s Ice is a story of a man obsessed. A nameless...
Category: Literature
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
★★★☆☆ Translated from the Arabic, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad updates a classic from the literary canon into a devastating, modern-day political allegory. In an attempt to give a rightful burial to the countless...
Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern
★★☆☆☆ Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, set at a quiet New England town, is a fairly derivative work that fails to rise above long-established industry plot scaffolding. Its writing style isn’t completely stale,...
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ All literature is the product of its history, possessing dormant traits of the author’s precursors and contemporaries. Whether inspired or incited by these sources, stories emerge from stories, and...
Phone by Will Self
★★★★☆ In 2012, Will Self published Umbrella, an under-read masterwork of Joycean proportions that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Umbrella reads as if Self found a loose thread in the conceptual stitching of...
Umbrella by Will Self
★★★★☆ With its epigraph from Ulysses and a revealing synopsis printed in the book’s front-endpapers, it is apparent from the start that Will Self’s Umbrella (shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize) will not...
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
★★☆☆☆ Asymmetry reads like the product of a promising young writer having completed a very good creative writing MFA program, who is subsequently unable to write much beyond a meta discussion of everything she...
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
★★★★☆ Carmen Maria Machado’s debut Her Body and Other Parties is a stunningly good collection of unsettling tales, each of which grow beyond their bodily horrors into metaphorical meditations on sex and identity. Using...
Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig
★★★★☆ After staying for a few months at the Hotel do Parque in Estoril, Portugal, world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found mysteriously dead in his room on March 24, 1946. He was due...
