This intensely oneiric work is a monument of vulgarity and erudition.
With his use of repetition, Perec establishes a rhythm of sorts, while his subtle deviations from the pattern serve as moments of dark comedy.
The expanse of the novel allows Russell to exercise the very considerable prowess of her imagination.
Dark and gritty streets don’t get that way by themselves. Lurking eyes, thoughts soured by peril and desperation, and minds numbed by sickness and perversion make them that way.
It will come as no surprise that one of Straub’s literary mentors is Lorrie Moore, the wonderfully gifted fiction writer whose lonely, depressed women populate countless short story anthologies.
It’s easy to picture Steinbeck at work on this morose addition to his canon during this period, which ultimately took him nearly half a decade to complete.
The novel ponders the ways in which we subtly adjust and absorb, internalizing the rhythms of a rearranged world.
It serves a worthy addition to the growing collection of critical and supplemental material on the making of a landmark film.
The book is as easy to swallow as the proverbial piece of cake, and takes about as much time to get through too.
Becoming absorbed in history, the novel seems to lose interest in its original motivation.
Ann Beattie speaks to her characters’ persistence in the face of loneliness and ambiguity.
Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors is at its best when asking sensitive questions about individual scenes and moments in Williams’s plays.
To live far away from home is to be ever vigilant, ever afraid, scanning the air for signs of danger.
Auster takes turns with his characters, alternating chapters and points of view, inhabiting most of these with convincing insight.
Some of the entries are set in stone from edition to edition, and that’s fine in most cases.
Disney de Sade, I think I’ll call it.
These stories engage with themes of disconnection, alienation, and the costs of straddling racial, sexual, and emotional divides.
Imagine now that passionate strain of teenage melancholia conflated with and compounded by the familiar cruelties of middle age.
The book allows us to construct our own understanding of Dahl and his oeuvre of weird, inventive, and wickedly funny narratives.
More than death, whose physical treatment reached its apotheosis in Everyman, Nemesis is about guilt, the nagging guilt that can leave a person spiritually paralyzed for life.
The heart of the book lies in its long, romantic discourses on the unseen entanglements and leitmotifs that run through all of our lives.