Zündel’s Exit bursts, then fades, refusing to become complete, to reach firm grounding.
House of Deer – Sasha Steensen
I’m always happy to see the I get up and perform. I have a weakness for confessions of hatred. And Steensen can be pleasingly disagreeable.
Three Brothers – Peter Ackroyd
As with the chivalric romances that permeate Don Quixote, or Ulysses’ Homeric cast, Three Brothers is a pastiche, though more compact than its predecessors, running breakneck on Victorian fuel.
Ten years since his last movie, the cult film director seems to want to remind us in his latest book of his capacity for filth, but he is not exactly bad. The Pope of Trash himself comes off as wholesome and almost staid.
I did not read Made to Break: I traversed it; I imbibed it; I rode it, like a wine-dark wave.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour – Joshua Ferris
Ferris approaches his protagonist like a kid in a guitar shop who only knows three chords: self-pity, self-loathing, and self-righteousness.
Tao Lin, get on your knees and pray.
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 Man with the Compound Eyes – Wu Ming-Yi
If the term magical realism creates a false subset of modernism, what is to stop cli-fi from functioning in a similar way?
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.