A Family Matter by Claire Lynch will be published in June in both England and America. (There is a giveaway on GoodReads, if you want to enter.) I expect it to be well-received. It is a beautiful, poignant, and pacific book with strong currents of pain, injustice, and joy beneath that carefully considered surface of…
I loved reading North Woods. Not everybody at book club did. There were even DNFs. I suppose it’s not an easy book and it is rather literary. But I thought it was exciting, very beautiful in its prose, unique, and well-executed. I will be looking into Daniel Mason’s other books and waiting for the next…
I would recommend that if you haven’t already, don’t read the synopses (at least the one on Goodreads) for Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. There is just one line of explanation that—if you are very observant and have a good memory—could destroy your experience of the book. Because there is a twist of sorts, and the…
I have never felt such strong emotion in both of two opposite directions as I did while reading Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente. I am not alone in either hating or strongly admiring this book, and I even found another reader who felt exactly as I did: I hated the book for a good long…
Trust by Hernan Diaz took home the Pulitzer Prize, landing it on my TBR. And with all the mystery behind its structure? It’s a “literary puzzle?” Cool. But it was the subject matter that killed it for me: Wallstreet and finance in New York City in the 1920s-1940s or something. But also the characters and…
It’s summer! Or it will be this month. Some of you have already moved into summer schedules and others are soon to follow. I have a week left of driving my son to school, but I am beginning summer read #1 tomorrow (finishing up another book today). Personally, I like my summer reads to be…
I had quite a wild ride with Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo. It is not a long book but I went in knowing next to nothing and it took some time for me to acclimate to the setting and the style and the structure. And then I was tempted to DNF the book but…
Goodness sakes. This is a tough book, of a sort. It is not just like Kimmel’s other books. It is highly academic, religiously explorative, and takes place in Indiana, yes, but it is pretty dark and trippy, falling down a sort of well into ancient Greece (think the dark side of mythology) while standing planted…
I have now read six books by Haven Kimmel, this summer. I have two to go. I don’t know why, but I saved the novels till last, and I am in the middle of the “loose trilogy” of her first three (of four) novels. The (very) loose trilogy is The Solace of Leaving Early, Something…
I suppose one of the reasons Haven Kimmel isn’t a super-famous author is because she backed out of the limelight on purpose at the height of her authorial ascension. But maybe that’s not quite right. It seems that A Girl Named Zippy, her first published book and a memoir which I will review in a…
This was one of the books that I read in my modern literature class in college in the late nineties. I hadn’t read much literary fiction before then, and I loved many of the books in that class. This one, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, was new and was soaring in popularity, especially since the…
For all the amazing-ness of All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr made some nontraditional choices: he went with present tense (mostly?), chopped his behemoth up into hundreds of few-page chapters (often even one page), told the story from two different perspectives (which was doubled in strangeness by being omniscient while being, as I…
Perhaps this is a crazy undertaking for me as a blogger, since it would be a little crazy for you as a reader to attempt what it will imply: reading a book a week for the year. I don’t know what’s wrong with me—or with other people, for that matter—that lists and attempts like this…
Well, this is the first Devon-y, from-the-best-books-list book review that I have done in quite some time. (In the old days, I read mostly literary literature, with an emphasis on world and trendy.) The book wasn’t actually slated to be next, but I am going to China in July, so I have started gleaning from…
There are a few people I will take book recommendations from and they are mostly in my writing group. This particular recommendation, for The Turner House, came not only as a title scribbled on my writing notes, but as a book pressed into my hand by someone else who had just finished it. “It reminded…
Is it a novel? Is it a book of short stories? Personally, I have it filed on my bookshelves in the short stories section, but you could really go either way with this Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. I came across this book several years ago, when it won the Pulitzer and landed on…
So, turns out lists of literary fiction are not that easy to find, unless you are looking for results from a particular year. That, however, is a list that I am not yet making. So I did my best. (Honestly, it’s not the easy to categorize literary fiction, anyhow. I’m pretty sure some of these…
Well, I suppose that I knew it was coming. Or, in other words, you can’t win them all. As part of my marketing and publicity strategy (I am very new to this), I am entering Benevolent into various book competitions throughout the year and even around the globe. It is the single-most expensive part of…
the starving artist 