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.
...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.
Transcription stands alongside its immediate predecessors as a fine example of Atkinson’s mature work; an unapologetic novel of ideas, which is also wise, funny and paced like a spy thriller. While it may lack the emotional sucker punch of A God in Ruins, Transcription exerts a gentler pull on the emotions...
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.
But Dillon does not shy away from letting us in, obliquely but unmistakably, to his own personal struggles with depression and anxiety. In these more personal passages, he resembles a critic...
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.
...Crudo seduces from the first sentence. Laing as Acker is not a literary device – it is literary detonation. Everything accelerates from there.
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.
That's really it: the relationships in Ponti are so stunted and painful that the novel evokes love mostly through negative space. There are hints of reconciliation and redemption at the end, but they come too briefly and too late to have much conviction.
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.
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.