The Legend of Pradeep Mathew – Shehan Karunatilaka
A bumbling, late-in-life version of a Bildungsroman, which reads like a coming-of-death story.
Artist books, at their very best, are little theaters: they take a literary text and give it sensory life on the page. What Carson, Stone, and Currie provide together is actually a staging of the play in book form.
Are You My Mother? – Alison Bechdel
Freed from the narrative demands that propelled FUN HOME, Bechdel crafts something intricate, internal, tightly woven even as it’s tortuous.
Beyond The Wall – James Lowder
Game of Thrones is both a critique and an expansion of the fantasy genre.
Sorry Please Thank You – Charles Yu
We look to genre fiction for something specific; something that the structure of genre can fulfill in ways that “literary fiction” does not — perhaps cannot.
Bad personality, bad prose, and sexism aside, the narrator’s anxieties about how to novelize history are legitimate.
The Land of Decoration – Grace McCleen
Judith’s preoccupations with death are more about her longing for a perfect world, one that she creates in miniature on the floor of her bedroom and calls “the Land of Decoration.”
CONFUSION will resonate with anyone who has felt the tension between desire and knowledge that sits at the heart of pedagogical relationships.
A Sense of Direction – Gideon Lewis-Kraus
The fundamental flaw is the concept: the idea that three pilgrimages is better than one; that three pilgrimages equals three times the enlightenment for the writer and three times the payoff for readers.
The Chemistry of Tears – Peter Carey
Abundant with sumptuously detailed antiquities — Islamic water clocks, ancient Chinese timepieces, and of course the impossible mechanical duck.