By Night the Mountain Burns – Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
It is a melodic text rife with images of hollowed canoes and mist-enveloped mountains.
Skeleton Costumes – Thomas Moore
As if Rimbaud were on Whatsapp.
The book provides you with the wincing secondhand anxiety of watching someone smart you know hurt themselves, repeatedly.
The Spectral Link – Thomas Ligotti
He is a metaphysical mutant in that he is a hodgepodge of clichéd horror motifs and effects, and metaphysical ideas. He’s a rhetorical monster.
Diary of the Fall – Michel Laub
According to these numbers, the narrator knows more about his grandfather (38+22=60) than either about his father (31+28=59) or about himself (31+26=57).
I don’t trust adults to write about youth as much as I did before I became an adult myself.
My Salinger Year – Joanna Rakoff
Oh, the ironies! given Holden’s low opinion of David Copperfield. To recall, he called coming of age novels written in the Copperfield mold crap.
A Distant Father – Antonio Skármeta
Brevity is not a shortcoming here and in no way keeps the narrative from being a fulfilling read.
Reads almost like slapstick Sebald, Bernhard on laughing gas.
Kit recalls the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, her florid prose style straddling the brilliant and the bathetic, her solicitousness for her charges as paternalistic as it is admiring.