The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse – Iván Repila
“Small goes on dying for days, and his brother goes on keeping him alive. As if they were playing.” This is Repila’s game, and he’s good at it.
Beauty Is A Wound – Eka Kurniawan
The concern takes us back to the original question: genre-based marketing labels risk reducing the individuality of books and flattening them into kitsch. But I’d like, hesitantly, to argue back: isn’t this only true if we think of magic realism as an ossified thing?
The Roar of Morning – Tip Marugg
The Roar of Morning is quite anti-climactic — in a digressive and descriptive mode it falls well short of self-knowledge or it fails to intimate truths, those buried umbilical cords, that an apocalyptic event is waiting to disinter.
Somewhere in the fibers of the book’s skeleton, there is a legitimate philosophical argument about free will or a lack thereof, and in many circumstances, it might be an interesting one.
Sometimes I Lie and Sometimes I Don’t – Nadja Spiegel
There is always the sense that Spiegel’s narrators are learning and relearning the rules of propriety; that they are struggling to negotiate public expectations.
The Things We Don’t Do – Andrés Neuman
The best stories in the collection are similarly masterful examples of the short form, and beautiful expeditions into the nebulous space between self and other.
The Sleep of the Righteous – Wolfgang Hilbig
It is a real gift to English language readers that finally, albeit posthumously, we have the opportunity to discover and admire a portion of this wonderful writer’s oeuvre.
Who could imagine a US intelligence agent caring about Beckett?
Book Club: The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector – DAY 3
Day 3 of an in-depth dialogic inquiry into Clarice Lispector’s short fiction, in which her embrace of the body, linguistic innovations, and interrogations of gender, sexuality, and the limits of the human are discussed.
Book Club: The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector – DAY 2
Day 2 of an in-depth dialogic inquiry into Clarice Lispector’s short fiction, in which her embrace of the body, linguistic innovations, and interrogations of gender, sexuality, and the limits of the human are discussed.