The Book of a Thousand Eyes – Lyn Hejinian
Its dizzying language granted the exact feeling I constantly have upon waking: that I’ve forgotten the point, that what happened is slipping out of my hands, that I’ve learned nothing in all this time.
There are books that you possess, and books that possess you. Clearly, THREATS is the latter.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank – Nathan Englander
The greater profundities emerge before Englander tries so hard to reach them.
The Femicide Machine – Sergio Gonzáles Rodríguez
That even biology cannot save us now is the gloomy possibility that THE FEMICIDE MACHINE places on the contemporary horizon.
The Next Right Thing – Dan Barden
It’s a little like reading Carl Hiaasen doing a Raymond Chandler impression.
The Case of the General’s Thumb – Andrey Kurkov
This undercurrent of cultural commentary carries GENERAL’S THUMB farther than the story itself.
Ragnarök: The End of the Gods – A.S. Byatt
Byatt manages to fill even this little book with her characteristic dense, glossy prose, each page carefully embroidered with beautifully knotted images.
Looking at a given artist’s self-portraits over time, it’s impossible to focus on the changing image of a self, without wondering about the forces that changed that person. Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind, before and after cutting off his ear. Levè bucks this mentality.
The Ruins of Us – Keija Parssinen
A novel about place written for people who are not from that place.
The Flame Alphabet – Ben Marcus
If language is indeed an elusive phenomenon whose power exceeds our capacity to wield it, this is a proposition that comes to our attention because it is advanced directly, in no uncertain terms…not because the novel itself embodies the idea aesthetically.