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Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
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Recommended Books Sidebar
If you look to the left, you’ll see that I’ve put up a sidebar where I’ll occasionally be listing books that I’ve recently liked and am recommending. I’d like to try this out as another way to help readers of this site discover some of the books that I’ve recently found to be noteworthy. I’m going to use it to highlight books that might not be getting the kind of attention they deserve, and that are doing significantly interesting things with plot, style, structure, etc.
The first two are: Agaat , which I recently had the good fortune to be assigned for review; and The Weather Fifteen Years Ago , which I never would have read but for my participation in the Best Translated Book Award. So, in other words, two fine pieces of literature that I owe the discovery of to other people.
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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. |
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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)
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