You may be wondering why I am giving you this account. Well, I don’t know really. A bunch of things happened and I’m just putting them in order. I’m doing it for myself. You are just a construction—you’re helping me to put things in order. You are my fictional audience and as such, I appreciate you very much. I figure when I finish, I will throw this out. Lucia Stanford ... Read More...
The Girls
I wanted them to like me. Such a simple sentence. Six words, and yet, coming three-fourths of the way through Emma Cline’s debut novel The Girls, they hold the key to the entire novel. They are instantly recognizable to any woman with a memory of her teenage years and they define fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd, the novel’s narrator. But as simple as they are they are also ... Read More...
Dear Fang, With Love
Because she wasn’t a trendsetter. No one could hope to be like her. She was one of a kind and, because of this, very much alone. About whether she was pleased with this state of affairs or saddened, I was never entirely sure. Maybe she would have liked to belong. ‘She’ is Vera, Lucas’s teenage daughter. For most of her life he’s been absent; she was the result of a wild whim ... Read More...
Sweetbitter
“You know what I dislike? When people use the future as a consolation for the present.” Tess arrives in NYC in the summer of 2006 from somewhere, but it doesn't matter where because as far as she is concerned she didn't exist before passing through the tollbooth onto the island of Manhattan. And we shouldn't care either, which we don't, because in short ... Read More...
Back to Moscow
Having recently read and adored The Tsar of Love and Techno I wasn’t sure I needed another book about contemporary Russian life. Happily, I ignored myself and read Back to Moscow anyway. Guillermo Erades’ novel looks at the modern day Russian experience from the microcosm of a young man in Moscow. Martin is twenty-four and has arrived from Europe as a graduate student ... Read More...
Black Chalk
There are many games to be played in college but none quite like the one designed by Jolyon and his friend Chad in Christopher Yates’s debut novel Black Chalk. The novel, just like the Game itself, begins with innocuous pieces to lure you in—Chad, the shy American determined to make the friends in England that he could not make at home; Jolyon, the funny British boy who ... Read More...
