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The rented Toyota, driven with such impatient exuberance…

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

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So the world at large, and America in particular is an especially misogynistic place. And this novel explores one particular facet of that misogyny, the disposable nature of women and girls. Based on the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident in which Ted Kennedy drunkenly drove off into the water, escaped with his life, while leaving the 29 year old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to die in the car, this novel explores the ways in which specific power of a Senator, and the more generalized power of […]

What were you telling yourself when it happened?

Pursuit by Joyce Carol Oates

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This is probably one of the more effective Joyce Carol Oates books in the last few years in part because it’s very very low on conceit and premise and high on tone, style, and execution. We begin right in the middle of things as a young wife, newly married as in the previous day, steps out of a bus, off of the curb, and in front of the same bus. It’s unclear what was going through her mind, whether or not she was attempting to […]

Short story review dump (Part I)

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami

Mastiff by Joyce Carol Oates

A Village After Dark by Kazuo Ishiguro

King of the Elves by Philip K Dick

The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami

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So I was nerding out a couple weeks ago, and started another database. This time, I wanted to compile a list of all the stories written by as many well-regarded authors as I could think of. It started off with just novels, but quickly grew to include short stories. Which means the database got out of control pretty quickly. I knew that many (most?) authors publish a lot of short stories – but when you actually see them all lined up….. It made me realize […]

Our hotbed of mediocrity

Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

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The title of this review is a quote from the novel to explain the place, our narrator, arrives in a form of political imprisonment where exiles are back in time to a middling university in the late 1950s. It also perfectly defines the novel itself. This is does not even have a lot of potential, but it does have a few small interesting ideas. For one, it’s interesting that the narrator seems to be addressing her contemporary context as an audience instead of us. But […]

I hope this isn’t how I’ll be going on.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

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I’ve been seeing the phrase “start as you mean to go on” flying around a lot as we collectively, tentatively tiptoe into 2019. 2018 was an utter disaster for me, and although 2019 is better so far – touch would, knock on wood, hug wood – I’m afraid of jinxing myself. I can’t say that I’m glad I read Zombie, and I very much hope it’s not how the year continues in terms of reading or anything else. I want to add the qualifier, “It’s not a bad book,” […]



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