The breeziness of the plot has the effect of keeping one from pausing too long on its suspect cultural politics.
Throughout, it often feels like a political thriller, a martial drama, and a magical-realist fable are duking it out for the reader’s attention.
The Big Green Tent isn’t a difficult novel, but its density invites an obsessiveness that’s often difficult to muster in this media-saturated age.
Oe again explores how fiction and truth mingle to create not just personal histories and relationships, but narratives of entire societies.
All paths lead to subjugation, to the forfeit of individual identity, to the death of the self.
Isabel Allende’s lyrical use of language, kept intact in Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson’s translation, alone makes this melancholy novel a treat to read.
Dennis Lim offers a wealth of poignant anecdotes that elaborate on David Lynch without attempting to reductively “explain” him as a human or a creative.
That the novel feels as fresh as it does is partly due to the thrill of rediscovery.
After reading the book, the film remains a challenge: narratively, stylistically, temperamentally.
Smith’s dreamlike tome feels like having unfettered access to the punk poet laureate’s innermost workings.
Brian R. Jacobson discusses architectural formations as inextricable from their industrial and artistic capabilities.
Valeria Luiselli’s novel is a meditation on the arbitrary nature of language and the commodification of art.
It would be oblivious to deny that Watkins in part shares her visions of sweltering badlands with writers like Joan Didion or Denis Johnson.
It comes to life as a touching portrait of storytelling’s way of restoring (and creating) fully-fleshed family units.
Each chapter is a testament to Mitchell’s ability to call forth an entire character’s life with an economy of language that’s beguiling.
Rushdie bellows A Thousand and One Nights’s narrative influence in a sprawling novel that’s an ode to storytelling.
The tension in the novel comes from Eileen finding within her a certain strength she doesn’t want to lose, finding her voice and realizing that it’s worth being heard.
Kleeman has an astute eye for pop culture, and her postmodern send-up of consumerism will remind readers of White Noise.
It may be centered around a dead man and the past, but at its heart it’s a book more concerned with the pain the living carry and the future it has shaped.
At 80 years of age, the iconoclast evinces the same passion that has animated his provocative work up to this point.
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