Tobias Carroll This week? Fiction was read in abundance. I finished Dead Souls after taking a break; the second book, in its fragmented condition, wasn’t as memorable as its first half — but that’s probably stating the obvious. (And even incomplete, it’s fantastic, with some of the omissions curiously in tune with the narrative perspective in the novel’s first half.) Stacey Levine’s Frances Johnson and Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater made an interesting double bill: dreamlike novels of women navigating complex and stifling […]
Indexing: ESPN, Erik Davis, Emma Forrest, and more
Jason Diamond I’m going to pick up ESPN: Those Guys Have all the Fun today after work. I’m pretty sure that makes me just another cog in the machine of this soon-to-be bestseller, but I don’t care. Also going to crack open Emma Forrest’s Your Voice in My Head this weekend. Possible review forthcoming.
Indexing: Nathanael West, Geoff Dyer, Gary Lutz, and more
Jason Diamond I’ve spent he last few year trying to come up with clever new excuses as to why I haven’t read Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, even thought I count The Day of the Locust among my personal top ten favorite books ever. That’s all going to change, and I’ve been reading the latest edition (2009, New Directions) of Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust with the Jonathan Lethem introduction. Picked up the latest issue of Tin House. I buy every issue, but this one has a […]
Indexing: Leila Maroune, Gogol, Tom Rachman, Philip Larkin, and More!
above: inaugural Look at This Fucking Hipster case study Nikolai Gogol. Tobias Carroll The week started and ended with works in translation. The first? Leila Marouane’s The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris, which I picked up last month during a visit to Powell’s. It starts out in a familiar vein: the protagonist is a successful businessman from an immigrant family looking to assimilate and advance in society; as the title suggests, we get more than a small glimpse […]
Indexing: Michael Kimball, John Cage, The Kentucky Derby, Christian Rock, and So Much More!
Tobias Carroll In preparation for the upcoming Civic Pride reading in which he’ll be taking part, I recently read Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody. It’s a novel I’ve heard praised by many; a few days after finishing it, I’m still assembling my thoughts on it. The structure is seemingly straightforward: the bulk of the novel is comprised of unsent letters written by a man named Jonathon Bender shortly before his suicide. We learn the basic details of his life in the […]
Indexing: Eugene Marten, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Twin Peaks, The Atlantic, and More!
Tobias Carroll Earlier in the week, I read Eugene Marten’s novel Waste, which I’d been meaning to read for a while now. It starts out reading like a case study in modern urban alienation: the protagonist works as a janitor, and seems estranged from nearly everyone around him. And then things get progressively more unsettling — one late-in-the-book scene features one of the most grotesque moments I’ve encountered in a nominally realistic novel. A day or two later, I found that moments […]
Indexing: The Stumptown Comics Festival, Karen Russell, Stephen Fry, Ezra Klein, and More!
Tobias Carroll I spent last weekend in Portland. One of my days there involved a trip to the Stumptown Comics Festival, at which I picked up a number of minicomics. Reviews of several are forthcoming, as are pieces on books picked up at Powell’s, Reading Frenzy, and Microcosm. What follows are brief thoughts on the books I read while there.
Indexing: Mat Johnson, Auden, Baraka, and Lyndon Johnson?
Tobias Carroll A recommendation from Jessica at Greenlight Bookstore led me to pick up Mat Johnson’s Pym, which I read earlier this week. On the surface, the description reads like an archetypal adventure story: an academic leading an expedition to Antarctica in search of a lost civilization. And that description does, in fact, serve to describe this novel. Except that Johnson’s working on a number of levels: this is at once an adventure story, an academic comedy, a satire of […]