A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride
If the prose style we encounter is initially resistant to our usual expectations, it acquires its own kind of clarity in advancing the narrative.
Consumed’s treatment of exotic and unusual STDs, the line between mental illness and unpleasant insight, uneasy sex, and gore is assured and well executed.
The Future for Curious People – Gregory Sherl
Let’s just say that if this book were turned into a sitcom or a summer blockbuster, it would star Zooey Deschanel and Paul Rudd.
Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours – Luke B. Goebel
Short sentences are followed by half-page, single-sentence paragraphs that read like David Foster Wallace channeling Hunter S. Thompson.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky – David Connerley Nahm
As dazzling and unsettling as a lone firework suddenly bursting — then just as quickly vanishing — on an otherwise dark, quiet night.
The Shimmering Go-Between – Lee Klein
To privilege surprise and suspense seems to reject the value of the possibility of critical distance, to render sacred the immersive entertainment value of story and perhaps most significantly to devalue the potential of re-reading.
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even – Chris F. Westbury
Imagine Duchamp’s The Large Glass if the bachelors and bride had transcended their respective glass panels, and were living happily ever after in Philly. I don’t know if I’d travel to Philly to see that.
I did not read Made to Break: I traversed it; I imbibed it; I rode it, like a wine-dark wave.
Descriptions of the rural landscape mirror those of the characters’ inner lives; it is barren and brittle, then gives way to wind and fire on a moment’s notice.
The Bend of the World – Jacob Bacharach
The sentimental conservative view is that the educated are taught everything but belief. The Bend of the World inverts that proposition. We are taught belief in art, institutions, personas, and higher planes of existence.