In 2013, through the immeasurable support of its contributors, Full Stop ran 93 reviews on new and reissued books by young, innovative, in translation, and otherwise under-appreciated writers. Book reviews can be the glass of a storefront between you and the book you will soon buy, drawing your attention, stimulating your curiosity and desire. Or they can be a pair of glasses that help you see a book more clearly. Here are a couple of glasses that are half full. Read them to read about a book. Or just read them.
Tenth of December — George Saunders
Reviewed by Daniel Green
Saunders’s fiction leaves the discernible impression its representation of human folly is at least partly meant to suggest we should (and could) stop doing and believing the things that make it possible. [Read More]
My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain — Patricio Pron
Reviewed by Alli Carlisle
Pron invites his reader into a slippery, liquid landscape, an unstable structure built on trauma and uncertainty, one just barely held together by its own surface tension, but vulnerable to the slightest pressure. The landscape gradually solidifies as the narrator begins to uncover a family history that has, until this point in his life, been only obliquely present. Pron’s novel weaves out of all this instability a beautifully fragmented book about the difficulty of locating tragedy in the post-traumatic worlds of nation and psyche, and the difficulty of writing when one’s own story has been broken. [Read More]
Middle C — William H. Gass
Reviewed by Alex Estes
Why are his fictional works read at all? Other than the way he wields metaphor, of which he is by far one of the greatest wielders alive, we read him for his mind. We read him because it’s Gass that gives us something to read. [Read More]
Speedboat — Renata Adler
Reviewed by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim
[Speedboat] is full of intertwining threads and axes of connection that arise not necessarily out of the expression of meaning, but rather from the rhythm of the feeling of not quite being able to fully communicate anything.The meaning, then, lies in the cracks and dissonances between thoughts and emotions. And that, perhaps, is the special draw of this half-forgotten novel. [Read More]
Love Dog — Masha Tupitsyn
Reviewed by Hestia Peppe
To take this work seriously is to recognise that this is increasingly the type of hybrid form that writing and thinking is taking in the world. Working in this chimeric, cross-category way is not a gimmick but a sincere engagement with the forms referred to and created by the writing. Playful and procedural experimentation with language is allowing writers to adapt to and inhabit new technologies of communication. [Read More]
Taipei — Tao Lin
Reviewed by Moze Halperin
Do not buy this book for the traditional reasons you’d buy a book: it will not satisfy with a captivating plot, sympathetic characters, or rapturous prose. But if you haven’t felt malice in a while, or haven’t reevaluated what you never want to be, this may be just the thing for you . . . I don’t hate myself or my life all that much, for I didn’t believe in the “soul” before being here confronted by its absolute absence, and now can at least convince myself that, at least in comparison to Paul or Tao Lin or whatfuckingever, I have one. [Read More]
The Son — Philipp Meyer
Reviewed by Stephanie Bernhard
Meyer does many things well: he skillfully weaves a centuries-long narrative that unspools new secrets to the last page; he serves a generous helping of beautifully wrought descriptions of Texas and the American West; and he melds utterly accessible language with real concerns about the shape of history, the perishability of peoples, and the subjectivity of morality. [Read More]
Strange Cowboy — Sam Michel
Reviewed by David Winters
For anyone trying and failing to match up meaning and feeling and speaking, Strange Cowboy’s tale will ring true. As alive as the West’s wide skies and wildflowers, this is a story to see us through the struggle to tell those we love that we love them. [Read More]
Night Film — Marisha Pessl
Reviewed by Eleanor Gold
What can I say? The lure of the forbidden is powerful. [Read More]
The Revolution of Every Day — Cari Luna
Reviewed by M.C. Mah
Novels of the city have much to lose. Vividness is one step removed from banality. An unadulterated mirror to our lives is a slight translation hiccup from a Rough Guide to streets we know better than novelists. In New York City, a small coffee accented by unwanted fruit costs three dollars. Who or what is responsible? [Read More]
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