Illustrating the change of seasons, Gal’s charcoal and digital collage images effervesce with cheery colors, moving from the radiant gold, yellows, and reds of autumn to the greens and blues of spring—with a stop in snowy winter for Chanukah, of course.
This little bit of bedtime foolery feels a little incomplete, but it should strike a chord—and it’s far wittier than the similarly themed Go the Fuck to Sleep.
The era is an interesting choice for a novel, and while the dialogue can veer into cliche, it is heartening to see a broader set of themes and periods tackled by this new generation of African writers.
...in its portrayal of power structures, it is part of those very contemporary political conversations. It is also a beautifully written and compelling story of how families fall apart and of what remains in the aftermath.
These are surprisingly illiberal themes for Dorfman, a public intellectual and admirable human rights advocate, but he doesn’t appear to have thought out their implications. Much of “Darwin’s Ghosts,” including its plot, its characters and its storytelling voice, would have benefited from more thought.
A great deal of this material is perplexing, demanding, and obscure, but the author’s beautiful writing is always well worth a visit.
More troubling is the self-important sexism, as he castigates the “mediocrity of sentimental girls”, and treats the two women in his life as objects to be moulded or abandoned.
The delightfully off-speed Alaska lore—the authorities offer two free nights in jail for information about the missing snowblower—is supplemented this time by a compelling portrait of a female Alaskan governor too monstrous to be anything but wholly fictitious.
By mixing panels with and without text, Porcellino creates a poetic alternation of words and silences that effectively draws the reader into Thoreau’s point of view.
Some readers might find it simply slight rather than clever sleight of hand, but Atkinson always puts on a damn fine show.
...setting public memory against private, chatter against documentation, until The Shape of the Ruins is less an album of stickers than a comprehensive critique of conspiracy aesthetics.
At the heart of the novel is Áine, who, bored with post-divorce life, takes risks that seem “unbelievable” yet mirror those we take every day. Áine’s growing realisation of those risks makes for a sobering life lesson and a gripping read.
Crudo is a news novel, and a Twitter novel, and a historical-record novel...It's a romantic comedy, in that it ends with a wedding. The prose is extravagantly beautiful, like the dahlia-filled garden where Kathy and her husband sunbathe naked. It's also exceptionally funny.
It is a forgivable flaw, given the accomplishment of this novel, which has universal appeal in its reflections on love and yet carries a glorious local specificity, even more so than 26a, which was set in the Neasden of Evans’s youth.
Both hard to read and hard not to, the storytelling leads readers through an experience full of horror, shadows and light; a love story like no other. It made me think – and opened my eyes to what happened at Auschwitz from a completely different perspective.
Szu’s angst is sharply drawn, but the sections on Amisa’s first years in Singapore are what lend the novel its particular pathos.
Iain Galbraith, who has also translated Sebald, gives “River”, and all its “lumber of cumbersome jetsam”, a special English poetry of grunge and grime.
While this sounds like it might be the set-up for a standard triumph-against-adversity narrative, a fall-and-rise story, Proulx has something considerably stronger, and subtler, in store.
Although the novel lacks some of the twists and surprises that Slaughter's readers have come to expect and at times feels repetitious and padded, the characters keep you involved all the way, as does the vivid writing.
Later, when Elma is finally castigated for her racial cluelessness by an astronaut of color (“For the love of God, stop talking….I cannot take the protestations of a well-meaning white woman”), readers will find themselves nodding in agreement. The worst tendencies of white feminism—in space.