Christopher O'Riley just finished reading Nikolai Grozni‘s memoir of his four years as a Buddhist monk, TURTLE FEET, as much a memoir as it is a philosophical novel in the grand tradition of Milan Kundera, but here with far better comic timing, and more hard-won truths. a beautiful book, and one which must be read, along with …
just finished reading the shortest of the great 20th Century novels: A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by the Yugoslav, Danilo Kis. William T. Vollmann’s essay of this novel as perhaps the single most formative and inspiring to his own work appeared in the volume i recently read, EXPELLED FROM EDEN: A WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN READER, …
just finished reading DBC Pierre’s romantic farce, LUDMILA’S BROKEN ENGLISH. worthy of DaPonte, a romp swirling together the lives of sundered British Siamese twins and the title-character’s family in a desolate hamlet in the Caucasus in war-torn present-day Russia, via an internet bride service. really funny, and a lot less at stake here than in …
the only pleasure capable of outstripping reading Lucius Shepard is re-reading Lucius Shepard. beyond that, there is only this singular gift of re-reading a masterwork of Lucius’ in a form spectacularly reworked by him. VIATOR, a novel centered on a freighter violently beached on a beach near a destitute port near Nome, AL, and its …
just finished reading Nikolai Grozni’s WUNDERKIND, a novel based on the author’s life experience as a gifted young pianist in a Bulgarian School for the Gifted in Sofia during the last days of the Iron Curtain. it’s a very dark but sometimes darkly comic novel, with, not incidentally, some of the smartest and most beautiful …
just finished reading the devotedly curated collection, EXPELLED FROM EDEN, A WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN READER, edited by Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson. i’ve read all of Vollmann’s work (admittedly, only the 800-page condensed version of the 7-volume ‘life’s work’ of Vollmann (though i do own the complete), his history and calculus of violence, RISING UP …