My Struggle (Books 1–3) – Karl Ove Knausgaard
Telling the truth at this length seems to ask in the starkest way possible why writers turn to fiction to give shape to experience.
Last Words from Montmartre – Qiu Miaojin
While Last Words from Montmartre can at times read as an outpouring of undirected and incoherent desire, it would be wrong to take it as the document of an emotional breakdown.
Shane Jones’ writing does not fit into any of the genres by which we sort the books on our shelves. Unless you have a bookshelf specifically for Weird, Delightful, and Sometimes Painful.
Vian peppers this Elysium with small, threatening glimpses of the world in which they live and to which they remain oblivious.
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.