|
|
Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
|
Imperial Fictions
Some indication Vollmann’s not done with the area covered in Imperial yet:
RAIL: So you did not stick with the idea of Imperial being a novel for very long?
VOLLMANN: That’s right. Now if I wanted to, I could write a novel set there, and I am as a matter of fact going back there and working on some short stories, some shorter fictions, but I think it would have been foolish to try to do that earlier.
|
Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it. |
David Mamet: Closet Conservative
The Humbling Lionel Trilling
Latest Review
Don’t Really Care About Touch Screens or Color
Your Moment of Dickens
New Critical Flame
Title Kind of Says It All
Jeanette Winterson at The Quarterly Conversation
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
You Say