We Live in Water – Jess Walter
Even though Walter addresses grim topics like poverty, childhood abandonment, or romantic injustices throughout his narratives, he implements his own sense of humor, which is dark, witty, and hewn with quiet vulgarity.
The weight of ambivalence is greater than any final oath.
Is Emil Cioran an author to be feared?
Linda Perdido is a story about wanderers. Not wanderlusts, and certainly not “lost,” but those who wander for the sake of it.
Odds Against Tomorrow – Nathaniel Rich
He addresses [fear] with poise and the kind of gallows-humor that would make Don DeLillo, Joseph Heller and Gary Shteyngart proud.
The Book of My Lives – Aleksander Hemon
It is in the moments of quiet dread — in that place where artful provocation, orgiastic ecstasy and unimaginable violence come too close together — that Hemon’s writing is most touching and terrifying.
The Faraway Nearby – Rebecca Solnit
Stories liberate us. Stories trap us.
Benediction sets out to do what old-fashioned realism, at its best, took as its central ambition, to portray life as lived, without the kind of artificial distortions that would make it seem either better or worse than the actuality itself allows.
A Guide To Being Born – Ramona Ausubel
These are fleshy fictions rooted in reality, miraculous bodies that produce and become disused like every other.
Brando, My Solitude – Arno Bertina
The narrator tries to ensnare his grandfather in prose.