Milo and the Calf

Tag: fiction

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    Proulx’s The Shipping News

    The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx I read the Shipping News in 1997 when I was twenty-two years old. It is hard to articulate now the effect it had on me. It’s moving, its beautiful, and it’s the first time I self-consciously realized I was reading a literary novel. I’d read other serious novels before,…

  • Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas

      Nazi Literature of the Americas, Roberto Bolano The first book I read by Bolano and it got me hooked. Ostensibly, a review of literature written by various Latin American fascists, it is, like much of work, occasionally funny, slightly surreal, and in the end disturbing and brilliant. One of these vignettes was expanded into…

  • Raymond’s He Died With His Eyes Open

    Dude, WTF did I read? He Died With His Eyes Open (Factory 1), Derek Raymond The first book in the Factory series of so called “exestensialist noir” following the nameless detective who works in the unsolved crimes division and sees the deepest underbelly of British society. In this book, he’s on the case of a…

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    Review: Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

    The Fifth Season N.K. Jemisin The first volume in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. The story of a world beset by earth quakes and other natural phenomenon, which can be kept at bay (or instigated) by a group of people with the power to control the forces of the earth. Called Orogenes, these people are…

  • Review: Enrique’s Sudden Death

    Sudden Death Alvaro Enrique As I’ve written elsewhere recently, my tolerance for difficult prose is at a bit of a low right now. But, if its coupled with a fascinating look at the politics of renaissance Italy, the life of the mysterious trouble painter Caravaggio, and the clever use of tennis as a narrative device,…

  • Review: Kang’s The Vegetarian

    The Vegetarian Han Kang Creepy. Super creepy. Disturbing. Interlocking stories revolving around an abused and disturbed women who turn to vegetarianism appears to instigate a series of events which destroy both her and her family. Of course, it isn’t actually her vegetarianism. It’s about the violence directed at her, the mental illness that violence (may?)…

  • Review: Bennett’s Pond

    Pond Claire-Louise Bennett Smarter minds than mine loved this book. A sort of stream of conscious narration of the life of a women in a small (Irish?) village. The book is often funny, and at times beautiful. The writing is excellent, with complex sentences that are perfectly structured, and the observances of the details of…

  • Review: Bolano’s Distant Star

    Distant Star Roberto Bolano Perhaps my favorite Bolano book yet.* A spin off of one of the chapters in Nazi Literature in the America’s this is the story of psychopathic fascist poet and murder. It’s also the story of how we justify Chile under dictatorship, the politics of art, and what literature is. Like all…

  • Review: Bolano’s By Night In Chile

    By Night In Chile Roberto Bolano Considered by many to be one of, it not the, greatest work by the Chilean master, By Night In Chile is the reflections of a dying priest, with a literary bent, on the life he lived. The books that captivated him, the generals who, the fellow Chileans lost in…

  • Melo’s Inferno

    A kind of sensationalistic kind of interesting novel of Brazilian street kid who goes on to become a drug lord of his favela before losing it all to betrayal, hubris and paranoia. Not a particularly new take on the story of the drug dealer (i.e. basically Scarface in Sao Paolo) but interesting none the less…