Amazon released this Kindle Single as a teaser for a forthcoming book from Joyce Carol Oates. I generally love Oates. She makes me uncomfortable in all the right ways, and reminds readers regularly that all manner of person can be a victim and all manner of person can be a predator. This is a fascinating and quick read, almost dream-like in some ways because it is first-person narrative in the head of a young man actively dissociating as a protective mechanism for seemingly numerous traumas. […]
I reject your heroine and substitute my own
Karin Slaughter is one of the very few thriller writers whose work I actually look forward to and buy on, or near, (or occasionally before, as bookstores here seem a little befuddled about embargo dates and English-language books) the official publishing date. I wasn’t a big fan of her last one, Pretty Girls, but the one before that, Cop Town, was a pretty damn good exploration of what it was like to be a woman on the police force in 1970s Atlanta. I heartily recommend […]
A Novelist’s Profound Discourse on Human Suffering
This was my first foray into the writing of Ruth Rendell, who now apparently publishes under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, and I was affected to the core by what some reviewers call her finest work. She takes the story of an outwardly successful family—a popular British author, his two beloved daughters, his caring wife—and forges a mystery so infused with sadness and psychological trauma that it can leave no reader unscathed. Gerald Candless is an imposing figure of a man—deep-voiced and towering, with leonine […]
Trauma, memory, and action
The play Blood Sky is ending its run at T. Schreiber Studio. I read the play in preparation for seeing it, but then a cross-country move prevented me from seeing it performed. This was a major loss, because I believe, like many plays, that Blood Sky would really come to life on stage. This is the story of Joley, a 30-year-old woman who is recounting her experiences at 14 and 18. She is played by three different women of different ages; at times, 30-year-old Joley talks directly to the […]
A work of Dickensian depth and breadth
This nearly 800-page novel is a revelation – it is one of the more complex literary works I’ve read in a long time and proved impossible to put down. The Goldfinch tells the story of precocious 13-year-old Theo Decker, who lives alone with his mother in New York City until their unplanned visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the day terrorists decide to blow the museum up. Theo’s mother dies in the disaster, but Theo survives and manages to extricate himself and return […]
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