Girls in White Dresses – Jennifer Close
Girls in White Dresses is the anti-chicklit. There are no poufy lap dogs or shopping sprees or cosmopolitans. Close’s characters are “chicks” only in the sense that they start out the book newly hatched from college.
Animalinside – Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann
At times, I felt menaced by the narrator’s belligerence; at other times, I struggled to take his delusions of aggression seriously.
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day – Ben Loory
In the first story of Ben Loory’s debut collection, a woman buys a book, takes it home, and is dismayed to learn that it is filled with empty pages. When she comes across a man reading the same book on the metro, her indignation grows. After she protests that he can’t possibly read a blank book, he defends himself: “You can pretend, he says. There’s no law against pretending.”
The Good and the Ghastly – James Boice
Boice defies the urge to fetishize. Instead, he inhabits his sociopathic main character and explores him from the inside. That’s why The Good and the Ghastly isn’t only timely and interesting and necessary. It’s also brave.
Stark uses equal parts force and subtlety in reminding us that behind the new-fangled office loft, there’s a decaying wooden water tower, beneath the city we know, there’s an older one.
Ann Patchett – State of Wonder
State of Wonder is Patchett’s most recent novel, and it establishes her as one of our most gifted writers of novels with real beginnings, middles and ends, novels of engrossing narrative velocity that come to surprising and almost primally satisfying resolution.
Albahari’s skill in immersing the reader in this grim conclusion justifies the energy required to follow the story, which at times feels like listening to a friend breathlessly recount a particularly confusing dream.
A rich but reserved examination of architectural themes while also an engaging story that opens up beyond romantic complications and addresses possible structures and forms a life could take.
Between Parentheses – Roberto Bolaño
In Bolaño’s world, writers are warriors and only the brave survive. Between Parentheses made me want to live there forever.
Funeral for a Dog – Thomas Pletzinger
Pletzinger foregoes polite innuendo and cheap sensationalism and writes self-determined characters. Matter-of-fact, imbued with emotion, disconnected, or a messy smorgasbord, the variety of desire is inked onto the pages.