Christopher O'Riley just finished reading Thomas E. Ricks’ latest: The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, a comprehensive history of the evolution and adaptation of our Armed Forces over the last 70 years. i’d been astonished by Ricks’ chronicle of the latest Iraq War, Fiasco, and this one is as authoritative as his …
just having finished Lucius Shepard‘s collection, The Jaguar Hunter, i come to the end of line as far as the most readily available of his work. Guess i’ll have to shell out the big bucks for Floater and Dagger Key. even though this 500-page compendium was comprised of a majority of stories i’d previously read, …
Just finished reading (thanks to Ann and Stona Fitch) The Dinner by Herman Koch, two couples-in-law at an upscale Dutch restaurant studiously avoiding talk about their children who’ve been up to no good. A dangerously unreliable narrator is the best part of this very dark domestic novel. Highly recommended.
just finished reading Lucius Shepard‘s 1993 novella, Kalimantan, set in the eponymous Borneo jungle, a tale of deception, perception, illusion become power; with the most viscerally-wrought alternate reality prose portrayal with an equally hallucinatory and utterly compelling battle scene, probably the best of their kind, by anyone; coupled with shorter fables of lush jungle mystery, …
just finished reading (been about a half dozen times now) Mark Z. Danielewski’s masterful and imaginatively unsurpassed Moebius-strip prose poem, Only Revolutions. Sam and Hailey are the culmination of Tristan und Isolde archetypes through all ages. Forever 16, they conquer the world. they are the world i’ll be composing music for the eBook of OR, …
just finished, topping off my George Saunders binge, his novella/fable The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a geo-political parable peopled by misfit toys bickering over their microcosmic boundaries. as always, instantly compelling textual landscape, a style unique to the needs of the piece, satire of the darkest stripe. a great voice of our time.