Newsletter
One brief book recommendation, once every month. Fiction and non-fiction, for the casual or voracious reader.Subscribe.
-
Claire-Louise Bennett – Pond (2015)
OCT 2024Shortly before the halfway mark of this book, there's a tiny story named Stir-Fry. It goes as follows:
I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so put in it all the things I never want to see again.
Stir-Fry is followed by a delightful seven-page story named Finishing Touch about throwing a little party (“I have so many glasses after all”), which I loved. After that comes Control Knobs, my favourite in the entire book, about the deteriorating knobs on the narrator's outdated Salton mini-kitchen.
I don't often read books of short stories. And, as I'm sure you can tell by now, this book is not your average book of short stories, either. But, it struck a chord. It moved me. Continue reading →
-
Miranda July – All Fours (2024)
SEP 2024In Miranda July's latest novel, its nameless main character (a 'half-famous' artist) sets out to drive across the United States to celebrate her 45th birthday. She leaves her husband and child behind, promises to update them on her progress and, through a series of rapid decisions, she winds up in Monrovia, the next town over. Continue reading →
-
Herzog has lived many lives and exudes an endless curiosity—as if, as a child, he fell into a Bavarian creek awash with potion and clambered out anew, like some German Obelix. Continue reading →
-
In March of this year I picked up Paul Auster's Baumgartner in a bookshop in Brussels. Known to be a revered author (‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’), I hadn't yet read any of his books before. I decided to start digging into his body of work with his latest novel, released at the tail-end of 2023. Continue reading →
-
In the wake of her new book All Fours lining the shelves of my go-to bookstore as of this month—and following her dazzling profile in The New Yorker, written by Alexandra Schwartz—I decided to re-read Miranda July's previous novel, The First Bad Man, published in 2015. It was her first novel, following 2007's No One Belongs Here More Than You (a collection of short stories). Continue reading →