To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf My rating: 5 of 5 stars When I was studying writing and literature in college, this was the novel that I often heard people speak of in the most glowing, wondrous terms. It is … Continue reading →
Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer My rating: 4 of 5 stars Gorodischer is an Argentine writer who has a take on fantasy that is reminiscent of Calvino, and this book reminds me of Invisible … Continue reading →
When I was in elementary school I would rush home to watch the saga of the Collins family of Collinsport, in which poor orphan Victoria Winters arrives at the gloomy old family mansion and descends into a gothic bog of … Continue reading →
Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan My rating: 5 of 5 stars The death of Bobo, the seeing power of that demon eye even after he is dead, as Solon moves him away from his killing ground – a fourteen-year-old child … Continue reading →
Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories by Can Xue My rating: 5 of 5 stars In stories that are indescribable Can Xue marks out a territory that is singular. I read the first story, for which the collection … Continue reading →
The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong My rating: 5 of 5 stars Her prose is the finest. The three women who constitute the voices of the novel are worlds apart, united only by the person of Lafcadio Hearn. Their different … Continue reading →
Dune Messiah & Children Of Dune by Frank Herbert My rating: 3 of 5 stars Goes like this. Tense situation implied. Everybody has heightened awareness. Prescience, spice sense, Bene Gesserit, Tleilax, mentat. Think think think about current problem. Something happens. … Continue reading →
The astonishing spectacle of a nation veering into cultural madness, in which ignorance is virtue, blindness is vision, and words of hatred are venerated as a courageous honesty, is new to those of us who are living through it, no … Continue reading →
I was raised to be a bigot in the ways that were common to nearly every white southerner of my generation, having been born in the mid 1950s and sent to school during the era of 1860s. I grew up … Continue reading →
I am aware that an advertisement that makes me notice its utter stupidity is just as useful to a marketing campaign as one that arrests my attention for some other reason. This is of course one of the more inane first … Continue reading →