Blogs about Books and literature

Vincennes Review of Books 2022 is here!Key:* = Excellent, highly recommend~ = Actively bad, do not recommendFirst readsThe Dinner — Herman Koch Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston Naples ’44 — Norman …

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki Read Apr 4, 2022 - Apr 10, 2022 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is a lovely book, filled with lovable characters and feeling. It is a novel about food, music, and …

The best conversations are unscripted and without agenda. As to content, they start from zero. Both parties spark and connect like neurons firing in the brain. No dead zones, no echoing silences. I spent almost …

Blindsided: Planet X passes in 2033: Earthchanges! Hazlewood (2nd Ed.) 2001 Submitter: This amazing conspiracy rant explains how the media, all the governments (except Putin’s Russia) and society in general suppress the truth that Planet …

The Guardian 2023 New Poetry Choices: A Found PoemA bold debut collectiondelving into Blackness,trauma, sexuality and the divine;poems of gender, transformationand the body in a collection aboutauthenticity and conformity;the personal is political in a collectionreckoning …

Thomas Ligotti, as a prose writer, is one of the best post-Lovecraftian horror writers. He has also published a small number of poem cycles, and Pictures of Apocalypse is I think the fifth of these. …

by Bobbie Jean Huff I was 12 when I wrote my first novel. It was four pages long, and in it Martha, the butt of bullying by her eighth-grade classmates, graduates top of her class. …

There’s an argument to be made about how narratives shape our perception of many things. A story can go beyond its stated power and intent through means of being seen with a different perspective, interpreted …

An end of week recap “It was an American who said that while a Frenchman’s truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman’s truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it …

Cat is mine, dog is not.

The leaves have turned, the nights have drawn in. The air smells different; peaty and smoky, suffused with the slight mustiness of mouldering leaves. Already I find myself wanting to hibernate; I’d rather be burrowed …

Last week saw the publication of Dana Gioia’s Meet Me at the Lighthouse, a perfect collection of poems. Dana has been a mentor and a friend to me, but had he and I never met, …

View of Russell, in Bay of Islands on my very first morning in New Zealand My first month in New Zealand has flown by. It’s been a fantastic trip so far and literally every place …

Much earlier, as in 2012, I wrote a series of small things that were meant for a book that I was then planning and researching. My intention was to write a cult(ur)o-geography of Lahore, a …

published 2018 Who knows where George Saunders’ head is coming from? I loved his Lincoln in the Bardo, which resembles no other book. And I love this short story, Fox 8 – beautifully tricked out …

Ridgeliners — I made a little trip to Hokkaido the other week. It had two purposes: To hang out with a good friend (which is what 90% of all my non-walk-related travel is centered around; …

I just noticed where NYRB Classics has released a new translation of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs. My brief notes on New Directions’ 1947 translation by Stuart Hood can be found here. I highly …

The Heart of HyacinthOnoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]New York: Harper, 1903251 pagesRead last month, I've put off writing about The Heart of Hyacinth because I still don't know what to think. To begin with, this is …

Whether or not you’ve watched season 2 of The White Lotus, Mike White’s anthology series, you’ve witnessed Jennifer Coolidge’s frenzied intonations onboard a yacht: “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” Coolidge plays Tanya, a …

Regeneration Pat Barker 1917 Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart. What to do with one of theirs who protests the war. With Wilfred Owen. The Eye in the Door Pat Barker The next in the series. I …