My Salinger Year – Joanna Rakoff
Oh, the ironies! given Holden’s low opinion of David Copperfield. To recall, he called coming of age novels written in the Copperfield mold crap.
A Distant Father – Antonio Skármeta
Brevity is not a shortcoming here and in no way keeps the narrative from being a fulfilling read.
Reads almost like slapstick Sebald, Bernhard on laughing gas.
Kit recalls the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, her florid prose style straddling the brilliant and the bathetic, her solicitousness for her charges as paternalistic as it is admiring.
The Maggot People – Henning Koch
Serious, grotesque absurdity: The Master and Margarita as written by William Burroughs, a politico-religious sci-fi thriller with talking dogs and immortal maggot people.
David Sedaris once quipped that speaking German is like speaking English but sideways. Reading The Wallcreeper — which happens, incidentally, to be set in mostly German-speaking places — feels like reading but sideways.
Our Secret Life in the Movies – Michael McGriff & J.M. Tyree
Films call up memories, and they also shape them, give them a lattice to grow on; viewing and memory, like lattice and vine, are interwoven. Everyone has a secret life in the movies.
The signifying power of the black hoodie, it seems, has aged well since 1993, and its longevity only attests to the persistence of many of the dominant strains of racist ideology in the contemporary United States.
This year, stories hit us deep. Collected here are ten of our favorite reviews published in 2014.
Belonging to a coffee table has never equalled a doomed lack of quality or depth.