The Mark and the Void – Paul Murray
Murray pulls off the impossible. He writes a funny, poignant, human, and philosophical novel about an investment banker.
B., like many other white members of her zeitgeist, cannot embrace her cultural present, so she tries to pilgrimage back in time.
Paulina & Fran – Rachel B. Glaser
In Paulina & Fran we see young women eager to shed conventions but ceaselessly drawn into their current when it comes to the ways humans traditionally relate to each other: with jealousy, longing, pity, hatred, love.
Beauty Is A Wound – Eka Kurniawan
The concern takes us back to the original question: genre-based marketing labels risk reducing the individuality of books and flattening them into kitsch. But I’d like, hesitantly, to argue back: isn’t this only true if we think of magic realism as an ossified thing?
Gold Fame Citrus – Claire Vaye Watkins
[Gold Fame Citrus] speaks to the part of me that sees a drained lake as more than a localized crisis affecting only a handful of fish, and wonders about the texture and shape of the greater crisis that an event like this portends.
In this short but expansive book which reads sometimes like poetry, sometimes like philosophy, and always like resistance, Berkowitz encourages us to become authoritative about our own experiences.
Martin John – Anakana Schofield
Martin John is not so much a character as a caricature of masculinity, a figure that, though, granted a privileged position in meaning’s labyrinth, is, nevertheless, caught in his own circuit, fumbling with his zipper.
The Roar of Morning – Tip Marugg
The Roar of Morning is quite anti-climactic — in a digressive and descriptive mode it falls well short of self-knowledge or it fails to intimate truths, those buried umbilical cords, that an apocalyptic event is waiting to disinter.
A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin
Berlin’s stories examine the consequences of living as if one were free when one is, because female, necessarily not.
Somewhere in the fibers of the book’s skeleton, there is a legitimate philosophical argument about free will or a lack thereof, and in many circumstances, it might be an interesting one.