Beer in the Snooker Club – Waguih Ghali
Written in English by the Egyptian author Waguih Ghali and published in 1964, BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB is worth reading as a classic story of the pain of being both too idealistic and too cynical to make peace with the realities of living. But it is particularly interesting to come to now, in the midst of renewed political change in Egypt.
The successes and misfires of Orientation ultimately hinge on the same thing: trusting the reader. When Orozco trusts his readers to orient themselves within the diverse structures and psychologies of his stories, they are copiously rewarded. When he does not, however, the stories start showing off, overcompensating, explaining themselves too forcefully.
The Book of Happenstance – Ingrid Winterbach
If there is something both moving and reassuring about looking back to the classics, to those texts, paintings, and sculptures of beauty that both precede and will surpass our lives and at the same time speak to us at a human level, what then do we make of the shell?
It was in New York, in an intellectual and cultural ferment consisting of rock music, contemporary German philosophy, LSD, homosexuality, and Abstract Expressionism, that Rose began her Lehrjar – her real apprenticeship.
American Masculine – Shann Ray
The Montana men of Shann Ray’s debut collection American Masculine: Stories drink and hunt, wrestle steers and reckon with fathers who beat their wives. They are Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine-Sioux, and white. They are men shouldering troubled pasts.
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle – Monique Raffey
Encompassing fifty years, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle introduces readers to the birth and early development of independence in Trinidad through the life story of an expatriate couple who arrived as colonialism left.
By Nightfall – Michael Cunningham
It’s a wonderful deception, and in turns sly and elegant, with language that is delicate without being florid, Cunningham transforms what appears to be a book about painters and curators into a treatise on the wingspan of the young and the disappointment of the aging.
The London Train – Tessa Hadley
Each character struggles with the existential questions they find themselves forced into: being only children and losing a parent; facing romantic commitments and romantic upheavals; finding themselves with children or childless.
Daughters of the Revolution – Carolyn Cooke
This novel brought back a nostalgic draft of the feeling I associate with discovering literature, when reading was a process of constant blossoming, feeling like my mind was being tended by the deceptively gentle hand of a master of immense talent and wisdom. It’s not a feeling I have very often as an adult reader, and it’s a gift.
My New American Life – Francine Prose
Francine Prose’s latest novel of near-realism, My New American Life, chronicles its heroine Lula’s attempts to find her niche as an Albanian immigrant in a land of dreams: New Jersey.