Review

This Bright River – Patrick Somerville

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“Here is something,” the reader is told repeatedly, as if about to be handed a gift.

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

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Like a generous spouse, Gone Girl gives everything a reader could want from a mystery novel.

A Breath of Life – Clarice Lispector

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Reading A Breath of Life, we feel Time (or God, or Lispector herself) passing.

What Happened to Sophie Wilder – Christopher R. Beha

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Filled with characters who live and breathe literature, the novel buzzes like a late-night conversation, dizzy with ideas.

No Animals We Could Name – Ted Sanders

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To die, in Sanders’ world, is to be drugged senseless; to live is to be drugged by the senses.

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew – Shehan Karunatilaka

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A bumbling, late-in-life version of a Bildungsroman, which reads like a coming-of-death story.

Antigonick – Anne Carson

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Artist books, at their very best, are little theaters: they take a literary text and give it sensory life on the page. What Carson, Stone, and Currie provide together is actually a staging of the play in book form.

Are You My Mother? – Alison Bechdel

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Freed from the narrative demands that propelled FUN HOME, Bechdel crafts something intricate, internal, tightly woven even as it’s tortuous.

Beyond The Wall – James Lowder

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Game of Thrones is both a critique and an expansion of the fantasy genre.

Sorry Please Thank You – Charles Yu

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We look to genre fiction for something specific; something that the structure of genre can fulfill in ways that “literary fiction” does not — perhaps cannot.