Usually, this is the kind of thing I do when the Tournament of Books is announced: a frantic flailing to try to read as many acclaimed books from a given year as humanly possible. This year,I decided to get things underway a little early. Maybe James McBride is the reason: his The Good Lord Bird seems to be racking up award nominations right and left; given that Jason also had kind things to say about it over at Flavorwire, I figured […]
A month or so ago, I went to an event for the Sarah Weinman-edited anthology of domestic suspense, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives. (Which, by the way, is fantastic.) The event featured Weinman in conversation with Hilary Davidson, and among the topics that came up were the definition of domestic suspense, and the way that it, as a genre, has passed in and out of popularity. I found myself thinking about domestic suspense a lot when I read Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest. […]
I may have lost track of the number of book groups I’m in at this point. Four? Five? I run one, and am now in the semi-regular position of putting together the reading list for early 2014. (One prediction: the expanded edition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love will make an appearance.) It’s something I value a lot — getting to talk about books with smart people is never not time well spent, and in a lot of cases, I’ve […]
Sometimes pulp is a detective in a fedora brandishing a revolver; sometimes it’s a rocket ship and a ray gun. Sometimes it’s more complex than that; sometimes certain basic elements are reworked and run through varying sensibilities. One can see the influence of Mickey Spillane’s stark prose on James Ellroy and David Peace, even as each brings their own particular sensibility to the table. (Related: this New York Times Magazine roundtable discussion of pulp is essential reading.) The three books discussed […]
It’s been another week where most of my reading has been taken up by books that’ll be covered in forthcoming reviews. What’s left? Two highly-regarded collections, and one exercise in taking familiar tropes and turning them towards experimental ends. I’ve heard great things about Kevin Barry’s Dark Lies the Island. His novel City of Bohane has been on my to-read shelf for too long, and I’d planned to use this more recent collection as a way of getting myself up to speed with regards […]
Last week’s column looked at isolation and solitude. This week’s goes in a different direction: finding literature that brings together unexpected elements in deeply effective ways. This can include everything from science fiction incorporating elements of folklore to surreal fiction inspired by the lives of animals to an elusive, digressive take on the detective novel.
I’m probably stating the obvious here, but: solitude can yield impressive literary results. Samuel Beckett made stunning fiction from characters trapped in their own heads. Novels like Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life take similar approaches, taking the inner life of singular characters to a heightened level. There’s a certain school of nonfiction that places a narrator alone in a landscape and lets them work wonders with the scenery around them. And that, more or less, brings us to […]
This week’s reading takes a look at reshaped genres. Science fiction takes a turn for the scientific, then veers into visions and world-spanning adventure; a familiar story of teenage outlaws hitting the road is given a haunting, detached treatment. There are a number of ways to turn familiar-sounding narratives into something altogether new; each of these books, in their own way, accomplishes exactly that.