Lightning People – Christopher Bollen
Unlike lesser character-oriented writers, Bollen manages to create lives that seem to have already been in motion before the book began.
Simply inverting realism through surrealistic distortion and discordance (as if “realism” is still the primary enemy of innovation in fiction rather than conformity of practice more broadly) is a limited strategy that can become just as conventionalized as realism. Working toward a hybrid of fiction and poetry would perhaps encourage writers–and readers–to focus more on language as the essential element of both.
Everything Beautiful Began After – Simon Van Booy
Great novelists hand readers the keys and ride shotgun, pointing out turns and exits whenever necessary, but never spoiling the destination. Van Booy is a backseat driver.
Hamlet’s Blackberry – William Powers
It is not the technology itself that Powers wants to criticize, but the tacit, unexamined philosophy with which we have so far invited these gadgets into our lives.
My Two Worlds – Sergio Chejfec
But what if this annoying character is a demonstration of how—deep down—freedom, truth, and everything modernity promised us from transcendental experience is what’s annoying?
Humiliation – Wayne Koestenbaum
Humiliation provides no solutions, and there is no satisfying sense of resolution, but as an exploration of an unwieldy concept, it is disarmingly vulnerable, and as eloquent as it is revealing.
The Magician King – Lev Grossman
The existence of this sequel—it turns out it will be a trilogy, in fact—does not ruin the memory of the original, but certainly dims it a bit.
How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive – Christopher Boucher
In college, I had a professor who urged us to interrogate a text by asking three questions of it, in order: 1) What is it saying? 2) Why is it saying that? 3) Why do I care? Christopher Boucher’s How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive may be the text to confound all three inquiries. Which is not necessarily a strike against it.
Combined and Uneven Apocalypse – Evan Calder Williams
Just think back to the feared “zombie banks” of the 2008 financial collapse, or to the current firesale of Greek industries, which has coincided with a renewed focus on occupying and repurposing urban territory in Syntagma square (Athens), Tahrir square (Cairo), and the many plazas across Spain occupied recently by the indignatos, and you can see how Williams’ theoretical preoccupations are not as peripheral as they may initially seem to be.
Instead of being a feel-good story about the unbreakable bond between siblings, or about rock music’s healthy catharsis, Stone Arabia is about dealing with the subtle terror of growing old.