The canon of world literature should not just reflect a liberal-humanist position.
Virginia Woolf: A Portrait – Viviane Forrester
A heady blend of cod Freudianism and prurient psycho-sexual sleuthing, compelling and objectionable in equal measure.
After the Tall Timber – Renata Adler
To anyone who reads it, either in its entirety or piecemeal, this book says, quite clearly: You have not been reading carefully enough.
The Mountain and the Wall – Alisa Ganieva
But the greatest loss were the bronze statuettes, cast millennia ago, of bare-breasted, full-buttocked nude female figures, laughing horsemen with dangling legs.
A View of the Harbour – Elizabeth Taylor
While there would perhaps be no Taylor were it not for Woolf, it is high time that Taylor is taken on her own terms and reclaimed as a major British novelist.
Book of Numbers – Joshua Cohen
The reader is put in the same position toward the novel’s depicted world as the protagonist is toward his own life, alienated as he is from his marriage and his career.
Haints Stay is dark, and bloody, and violent: raw and cutthroat and still capable of reducing you to helpless snickers.
[Cynan Jones] endeavor[s] to “put the complex into the simple,” to borrow Empson’s definition of the pastoral. Certainly no creature is simpler than a sheep.
The Essence of Jargon – Alice Becker-Ho
Slang words may have multiple origins and equivalents, taking sometimes-meandering paths to their final meaning.
However, it’s not long before Björn discovers a problem with the room: he is the only one who can see it.