Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day – Ben Loory
In the first story of Ben Loory’s debut collection, a woman buys a book, takes it home, and is dismayed to learn that it is filled with empty pages. When she comes across a man reading the same book on the metro, her indignation grows. After she protests that he can’t possibly read a blank book, he defends himself: “You can pretend, he says. There’s no law against pretending.”
The Good and the Ghastly – James Boice
Boice defies the urge to fetishize. Instead, he inhabits his sociopathic main character and explores him from the inside. That’s why The Good and the Ghastly isn’t only timely and interesting and necessary. It’s also brave.
Stark uses equal parts force and subtlety in reminding us that behind the new-fangled office loft, there’s a decaying wooden water tower, beneath the city we know, there’s an older one.
Ann Patchett – State of Wonder
State of Wonder is Patchett’s most recent novel, and it establishes her as one of our most gifted writers of novels with real beginnings, middles and ends, novels of engrossing narrative velocity that come to surprising and almost primally satisfying resolution.
Albahari’s skill in immersing the reader in this grim conclusion justifies the energy required to follow the story, which at times feels like listening to a friend breathlessly recount a particularly confusing dream.
A rich but reserved examination of architectural themes while also an engaging story that opens up beyond romantic complications and addresses possible structures and forms a life could take.
Between Parentheses – Roberto Bolaño
In Bolaño’s world, writers are warriors and only the brave survive. Between Parentheses made me want to live there forever.
Funeral for a Dog – Thomas Pletzinger
Pletzinger foregoes polite innuendo and cheap sensationalism and writes self-determined characters. Matter-of-fact, imbued with emotion, disconnected, or a messy smorgasbord, the variety of desire is inked onto the pages.
Beer in the Snooker Club – Waguih Ghali
Written in English by the Egyptian author Waguih Ghali and published in 1964, BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB is worth reading as a classic story of the pain of being both too idealistic and too cynical to make peace with the realities of living. But it is particularly interesting to come to now, in the midst of renewed political change in Egypt.
The successes and misfires of Orientation ultimately hinge on the same thing: trusting the reader. When Orozco trusts his readers to orient themselves within the diverse structures and psychologies of his stories, they are copiously rewarded. When he does not, however, the stories start showing off, overcompensating, explaining themselves too forcefully.