There is something anti-story in every story, where the force pushing towards narrative resolution is challenged by a slightly ethereal centrifugal drift which slows, and maybe even reverses, that centripetal approach.
A Beast in Paradise – Cécile Coulon
A Beast in Paradise is far less a rural book, let alone a small-town book, than a farm book.
On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt – Ann Heberlein
The priceless contribution of Heberlein’s book, for all its occasional bowdlerizing, is that it offers the requisite connective tissue for the grand and the ground-level.
Serotonin – Michel Houellebecq
Houellebecq’s aloof intensity remains paradoxical, provocative, and singular.