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...
★★★☆☆ 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...
★★★☆☆ 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, 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,...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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 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...
★★★★☆ 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...
★★★★☆ 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...