A Breath of Life – Clarice Lispector
Reading A Breath of Life, we feel Time (or God, or Lispector herself) passing.
What Happened to Sophie Wilder – Christopher R. Beha
Filled with characters who live and breathe literature, the novel buzzes like a late-night conversation, dizzy with ideas.
No Animals We Could Name – Ted Sanders
To die, in Sanders’ world, is to be drugged senseless; to live is to be drugged by the senses.
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.”