Davis’s sentences channel that half-state between consciousness and unconsciousness, that foggy place where you realize you’re waking up but are still enraptured by the vivid imagery that’s been parading through your head all night.
The Woman Upstairs – Claire Messud
A treatise on repressed creativity, voyeurism, obsession, and misanthropy, The Woman Upstairs is an exhausting ego-trip to behold.
Under This Terrible Sun – Carlos Busqued
Stoner culture and noir, when both are at their best, are experiments in mood and atmospherics.
The Currency of Paper – Alex Kovacs
The Currency of Paper is certainly a novel of ideas, albeit in a more literal sense.
Whether the book does succeed in being comforting or in making its readers happy — depends perhaps upon the reader’s tolerance for Schadenfreude
Lotería – Mario Alberto Zambrano
Fiction is never real, but good fiction is always true.
An irrepressible story, one that dissolves all certainty, and which can hardly be contained by words without threatening to burn them to the ground.
Algerian Chronicles – Albert Camus
In Algerian Chronicles we get both the settled position of Camus on Algerian independence and a study of what led to this exasperated tone – namely the insufficiencies of humanist principles to get a fair hearing during a particular kind of political sequence.
Call it psychological. Even call it sociological. But it is not political. It’s far too broad in scope for that.
A difficult novel should be difficult because it prompts us to reexamine our facile assumptions, not because it’s boring.