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Blend of other and the familiar, good without tipping great, the flat at the end couldn’t detract from my bitter joy.
Not perfectly for this reader, given shrugged elusion of the stream style in the second piece. Still, the rest was masterful and I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t contemporary.
Selin returns to Harvard for her sophomore year, spends lots of time thinking about Ivan, …
Loved, in a heady sort of way, although it was more Helen DeWitt this time around than Rachel Cusk.
Fragments. Of senses, sentences, vibes. I think I see intent but didn't deliver beyond scratching itch and the pathos stuck up sat on a tree branch.
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from …
“How Ferrante like.” As if the construct of Shelly’s monster split into two has not been tried before. Still, and yet, Li’s take is soft and weighted and just enough fantastical and horrendous.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …
More pat, if not more enjoyable, as Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” meets “Glass Hotel”. I find myself more and more comparing rather than absorbing. “How Ferrante like, how so Cuskan, how pale Le Guinian.”
Trafficking in Ferrante familiarity, it doesn't quite plumb the same depths, even allowing for the brevity.
Pockmarked. A bit too so for me, now.
In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners …
This fucking book. I felt all the feels. And not just all the good ones but the bad feels as well, the icks as the youths would say. Technically, I shouldn't like it, and in many didn't think it'd work, which I suppose is also a meta feel also likely intentional and also annoying in it's frustrating accuracy. I feel a bit like Emily I suppose. Which is all the point, no?
Roiling cocktail of “what if Katniss Everdeen was trans?”
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d …
Perhaps it isn’t fair, so close to Cusk, to think Rachel wrestles with her writerly-ness with more detached but interesting nuance. That said, Rooney posed the questions with empathy and familiarity.
A Year in Provence is a 1989 best-selling memoir by Peter Mayle about his first …
Charming and quick, just enough to round out the bygone.
Engrossing, but perhaps due more to the familiar rather than the art.
There are many stories, too many perhaps, all of the same ilk. I was in a bookstore the other week, shelves by owner’s whim, with five labeled just “mid American mad men.” If latter seasons Mad Men was suburban NE corridor, but also ignored the women characters, it’d be Cheever-esque.
Divorce plot best imbibed in a ruminative quaff—no less refreshing for the lightness.
