Am I Alone Here?
A personal collection of essays that blurs the line between literary criticism and personal memoir.
reading
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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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The Undiscovered Chekhov
Unpublished works collected and translated by Peter Constantine
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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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The Discovery of Heaven
discovery-of-heaven.jpg The Discovery of Heaven is framed by an ongoing conversation between two angels in heaven, looking down upon Earth. God has become profoundly disillusioned with humanity—specifically our technological arrogance, moral failures, and the dangerous hubris of splitting the atom. Feeling that mankind has broken its side of the spiritual bargain, God decides to terminate His covenant with the world. To do this, he demands the retrieval of the physical stone tablets containing the original Ten Commandments, removing them from...
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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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Mother River
Short stories from renowned Chinese author Can Xue.
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Musems and Women and other stories
A collection of short stories.
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To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969
Larry Levis brings raw emotion to his poetry; “To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969” goes from zero to sixty in 3 seconds.
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Satantango
Labyrinthine masterpiece that captures the slow-motion collapse of a Hungarian collective farm.
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Palestinian Walks
A series of reflective essays about moving through the landscapes of the West Bank and Gaza region.
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The Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival....
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The Golden House
Nero Golden, patriarch in his twilight, a Lear in a silk dressing gown, presiding over a trio of sons who embody current fractured anxieties.
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The Assault
A truly remarkable novel that begins with a tragic turn of events for the Steenwijk family
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a travel narrative recounting an 1689 journey cross-country.
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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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The Enigma of Arrival
V.S. Naipaul novel about an immigrant's experience of England.
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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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What We Can Know
The thematic core of the novel interrogates the limits of knowledge and memory.
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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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In Xanadu
in xanadu A travel adventure to commemorate Marco Polo’s journey along the Silk Road, Scottish historian (Cambridge student at the time he took this journey), William Dalrymple, uses older historic narratives and maps to help guide him and fellow travelers from the Holy Land to Xanadu (Shan-tu, just north of Beijing). Dalrymple's more recent book, The Golden Road posits that Indian ships were a more economical and vital trade route than the better known (and slower) land route of the...
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Antarctica
I separate these very well-written stories into the following categories: dark, sad or scary.
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Seven Empty Houses
Schweblin, an Argentinian writer, has written the finest story I've yet read about someone experiencing dementia…
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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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The River Between
The River Between A wake-up book for the study of post-colonialism in Africa and a spark point for outrage by public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens from what was made known to the world (female genital mutilation). It will challenge anyone’s worldview and where they sit on the moral relativist scale. The choice presented in this novel between the Christian missionaries and indigenous tribal rights is impossible. A young man of the Gikuyu tribe named Waiyaki is the focal point in...
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Things Become Other Things
The walk and the environs are the stage settings for the people Mod encounters,
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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)