The Large Door – Jonathan Gibbs
It probably says something about the contemporary cultural moment that Jonathan Gibbs’ sanguine and emotionally generous rendering of workplace sexual frisson feels just as ever-so-slightly anachronistic as the midcentury elegance of his prose style
This novel reads like a master-class in workshopped excess, rattling off, with cloying exhaustiveness, every trick in the experimental fiction handbook: abruptly shifting voices, the omission of pronouns, the stylized eschewing of punctuation, relentlessly conspicuous obliquity, semi-ironic deployment of recherché archaisms, etc., etc.
The Story of My Teeth – Valeria Luiselli
The wider current to which this book belongs probably cannot sustain many more publications of this type without incurring some sort of backlash.
Virginia Woolf: A Portrait – Viviane Forrester
A heady blend of cod Freudianism and prurient psycho-sexual sleuthing, compelling and objectionable in equal measure.