Blogroll

Book Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Science fiction — excuse me, speculative fiction — loves series. For whatever reason, readers — and evidently authors — can’t get enough of particular worlds or characters. And just as Margaret Atwood distances her fiction from science fiction, she may be taking the concept of a series in a different direction.

Atwood’s latest novel, The […]

Book Review: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia

Mention Russian literature and most people think of two things. One is the pre-revolution authors whose names are familiar in the West, such as Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The other is the Soviet era, where the government controlled what was published and writers like Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman struggled to have their […]

Book Review: The Sixties by Jenny Diski

Every time period has its trappings. And while it may be impacted by its recency, it’s hard to imagine a historical period that carries more baggage than the 1960s. In her reflective quasi-memoir The Sixties, British author Jenny Diski sifts through some of the baggage but ultimately comes away dismayed and discouraged.

At the outset, […]

Book Review: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

Writing an adroit novel is a challenge any time, but especially if you’re going to throw in ninjas and mime troupes. Setting the story in a post-Apocalyptic world also requires more than a bit of imagination. Throwing in a twist readers don’t see coming but find entirely acceptable is a Chinese puzzle in and of […]

Book Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

Some authors take time creating an overall feel for their book. But when you’re writing a novella of well under 100 pages, you don’t have much time to set the tone. Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin doesn’t waste any establishing the tenor of Beauty Salon. He does it with the first two sentences: “A few years […]