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.
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.