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Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

December 3, 2014

Billy lynn

Imagine you are a nineteen-year-old soldier and while stationed in Iraq your squad came under insurgent attack in an isolated area. You commit a heroic act of bravery and leave your vehicle to try and save a friend who is being dragged away by the enemy. A Fox news crew captures the entire attack and when it goes viral you are all brought back to the United States to be ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: American life, book clubs, contemporary life, ecco, war

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

November 10, 2014

we are all completely

Narrator Rosemary Cooke begins We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in the middle of her family’s story, which is a quick indication of how this unusual and highly imaginative novel is going to go. The year is 1996 and she’s in her fifth year of college. A gregarious child she has morphed into a quiet and secretive young woman, largely due to the circumstances regarding the ... Read More...

4 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary fiction, family, literary, mystery, Putnam

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

October 22, 2014

girl half formed

  The heart cannot be wrung and wrung. Eimear McBride brings her main character to life with prose so fractured that A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing reads a bit like Clockwork Orange. There is no made-up language, but McBride uses a combination of Magnetic Poetry and Yahtzee to throw out words in random order with punctuation as an afterthought. Abandon any hope for sentence ... Read More...

12 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged: Coffee House Press, contemporary fiction, debut, literary

Rooms: A Novel

October 10, 2014

rooms

  People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something—the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing—remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.  Richard Walker has died and the country house ... Read More...

5 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, ecco, literary, mystery, paranormal

Dept. of Speculation

October 8, 2014

dept of speculation

  Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is a tiny slip of a novel, small in size, only 156 pages long, and yet it chronicles a young woman’s life with as much intimacy as novels of greater length. Somehow, Offill uses words to their maximum advantage in a minimum of space. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, recounts her life from her days as a single woman ... Read More...

6 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, family, Knopf, marriage

The Diamond Lane

October 6, 2014

diamond lane

Life here was weighted with the vague feeling that if anything was happening, it was happening wherever one wasn’t. Maybe that accounted for all the driving…Eleven million people scurrying around, trying to find the exclusive exciting event that would make them feel at the center of something big.  Mimi Fitzhenry is the type of living-in-Hollywood character who chooses to ... Read More...

1 Comment
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: contemporary life, Hollywood, satire

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