Am I Alone Here?
A personal collection of essays that blurs the line between literary criticism and personal memoir.
american
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The House of Mirth
Set in the ruthless high society of Gilded Age New York, The House of Mirth traces the tragic downward spiral of Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished woman whose moral conscience repeatedly prevents her from securing a wealthy marriage for survival.
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Transcription
A former student travels to interview his 90ish professor for a magazine article. His recording device (an iPhone) breaks just before…
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Feelings
A short story about how to achieve empathy through compassion and imagination using the complexities of young children and adults as a prism.
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Vigil
a woman who died tragically in her early twenties during the 1970s and now serves as an ethereal death doula.
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Musems and Women and other stories
A collection of short stories.
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Stoner
stoner It’s all spoilers below, so get the book and read it. I found it engaging, though I have a bit of trouble with the premise some back of the book blurb makes about ‘readers worldwide’ are coming to a new appreciation of this book. William Stoner feels stuck on a family farm, performing the same chores day-in-day-out. Perhaps his parents pick up on this and decide to send him to university to pursue a course in agriculture, which he...
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Tomorrow x3
tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.webp A friend’s daughter was assigned this book in class (high school) and she recommended it highly, so I figured, ok, I know she’s a bright young woman with a dad with good taste in friends, so I read the first free chapters and was hooked. First, it’s about the gaming industry, second it’s about young entrepreneurs, third it’s about friendship, fourth it has allegorical underpinnings from a certain Greek epic, fifth, it touches on many contemporary hot-button political issues...
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Shadow Ticket
Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket arrives like a cipher slipped under the door of contemporary America.
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The Swimmer
Ned Merrill is at a party and suddenly envisions himself as a great man about to embark on a swim across the county by way of backyard pools in a tony suburban NY community.
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Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre Leonard made extensive use of research and a researcher named Gregg Sutter for many of his novels, and Cubra Libre seems to be one of the more exhaustively researched and well-penned (he never used a computer or word processor, and rarely a typewriter) books in his oeuvre. Leonard, who began as a writer of westerns, then turned to city crime books, is back in semi-familiar territory in this book with a cowboy protagonist (Tyler) running horses to Cuba....
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The Hunted
An unfortunate bit of timing has our hero captured in a front page story
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Speedboat
There is a vibrant quality running through the narrator's life that I would equate to a good noir detective novel that keeps the page-turning pace up, with the occasional weirdo wandering into the story (more than a few times)
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M31
UFO nutjobs find themselves in an extremely well-written novel.
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The Wager
A tale of an unusual 18th century mutiny.
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Trust
A tale that revolves around a wealthy financier, Benjamin Rask, and his enigmatic wife, Helen.
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The Dog of the South
Ray Midge, a bean counter in Arkansas, is our leading man and narrator. One day, his wife leaves him for Guy Dupree, but what's worse is that she takes his car.
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Hail Mary
Hard sci-fi from the author of The Martian.
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The Devil and Sherlock Holmes
Essay collection by the author of Killers of the Flower Moon.
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In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
A new and compelling discovery for me. The work is difficult to summarize or put into a genre, oddly.
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Pastoralia
My favorite collection of Saunders' short stories until Tenth of December
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Stella Maris
Plenty of philosophical themes in this patient - psychologist dialogue
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The Passenger
Really well done multiple personality disorder character. Also a side mystery
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Passing
Two light-skinned Black women from the same neighborhood follow very different trajectories in life and one day reconnect.
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The Nickel Boys
A chilling novel based on a true story, which begins with hope and ends in tragedy.
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The Bear
The Bear follows a young boy named Isaac McCaslin, who goes on numerous hunting trips into the wilderness with his uncle and other men.
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The Dispossessed
The Dispossessed is about a planet and its moon and the clashing cultures…
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Lucy By the Sea
The novel begins with William Barton visiting his ex-wife in NYC as the COVID-19 epidemic begins.
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Liberation Day
A collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair,
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To Have and Have Not
Hemingway's _To Have and Have Not_ is a commentary on the time of The Great Depression told from multiple viewpoints.