Ash Amin’s new book Land of Strangers is “for an idea – that the stranger is neither friend not foe, but constitutive” of the health of societies.
The Miniature Wife – Manuel Gonzales
How to make this strange, cold, cluttered world into something human.
How To Think More About Sex – Alain De Botton
Alain de Botton doesn’t think much about his own thinking, nor does the book encourage the reader to.
So how do we use it?
Tenth of December – George Saunders
Saunders’s fiction leaves the discernible impression its representation of human folly is at least partly meant to suggest we should (and could) stop doing and believing the things that make it possible.
How Literature Saved My Life – David Shields
The title of the book, tongue-in-cheek but still on the cheesy side, fits the showing-all-my-cards-right-up-front ethos of the project.
See Now Then – Jamaica Kincaid
Whether Mrs. Sweet’s or Jamaica Kincaid’s, this failure of imagination is the novel’s gravest flaw.
An Enlarged Heart – Cynthia Zarin
(The above may preclude the reviewer’s objectivity.)
To Kramer’s credit, and to the reader’s dignity, there is no life because life itself is comprised of death, of disease, of a boy’s rotten teeth and a lover’s disintegrating body.
The Aylesford Skull – James P. Blaylock
THE AYLESFORD SKULL is a fairly straightforward adventure story, but Blaylock’s attempts to situate his novel in a historical moment backfire.