One of the best things about reading Joan Didion is her honesty, the fact that she hasn’t forgotten the uncertainty that comes from being young, or just how hard it can be to part truths from myth.

Didion once wrote about having seriously considered building a shopping mall empire to support herself as a writer, and in Where I Was From she is still thinking about the complicated, alienating place where she grew up – about why it has so often left her feeling troubled or chagrined. “For most of my life California felt rich to me,” she admits, “that was the point of it, that was the promise.” …more

The great thing about Russian literature is how strange it is.

The characters in Dostoevsky are always breaking out in histrionics. They bustle about, shake their fists, and call each other scoundrels. They “fly” to wherever they are going and “fly at” each other when they get there. “What on earth does it mean to ‘fly at’ somebody?” David Foster Wallace once asked, in an exasperated footnote in his essay on Joseph Frank’s literary biography of the Russian novelist. …more

Editor’s alert: Key plot points of this book are discussed below.

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The plot trajectory of the book: kind of expected, to tell the truth, but Oscar Wao, the main character, is the loneliest sci-fi nerd in the Dominican Republic, and I really love him. …more

The last book I loved was On the Lower Frequencies by San Francisco’s Erick Lyle, editor of the underground-classic Scam zine, freelance journalist, and musician-at-large. The book reads as a kind of political and cultural memoir, mostly comprising essays and stories previously published in Scam or the TFD, a newsletter covering San Francisco politics.

On the Lower Frequencies spans a wide-ranging grip of topics, including organizing and playing in illegal punk shows in the Mission, marching in the city-shutting-down protest against the war, and a hilarious and terrifying account of the donut shop that was the “epicenter of crime” of San Francisco, which readers might recognize from Lyle’s reading on NPR. …more

The last great book I read was The Dream of the Poem, translated, edited and introduced by Peter Cole.

Well, that’s a lie. I should say that it’s the great book I dabble in, here and there, in frantic, frenetic moments, moments that invariably make me turn the music up loud and run around the house, wishing there was a reasonable way to tattoo the star of David and moon of Islam on my respective fists. …more

My framed, original Marilyn calendar has been glaring at me from my den wall ever since I finished Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde.

When I look at it now, I feel as if I was there when it was shot. I’m not sure if I was the camera, the photographer or the desperate, naked girl- doomed and luminous and ashamed of the soles of her feet. …more

There is nothing else quite lik Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontës Went to Woolworths, in which a family of sisters and their widowed mother in 1920s London live a most unusual life of the mind.

The Carne family are arty and bohemian, but solidly upper class …more

Set in New York City, Another Country presents a group of friends and artists struggling not to be wrenched apart by race, sexuality and ambition.

The novel begins with Rufus, a bright and kind black drummer from the South, who has forsaken his musical promise and sanity in the name of loving a white woman. …more

An old professor from college writes me and asks for my snail mail address. It isn’t such a strange request – we have developed a kind of friendship since I graduated. I babysit his daughter on occasion; we meet at the corner store for coffee when we can both find time, which is almost never.

A week later a package arrives at my mother’s house, where I am staying for a month to sort some things out. The package is addressed in my professor’s handwriting, and inside is Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb. The book is yellow, with a silver and blue graphic on the paperback cover, drooping in my hand as I hold it, standing in the middle of my mother’s hallway. …more

I came home from the library with The Road and climbed into bed to start reading. He joined me with a proposition: Let me read it first or I’ll never get around to it. I hesitated.

I bought a different book today he said, and pulled Alberto Moravia’s The Voyeur out of his bag. The cover seemed interesting enough, a single eye looking through a circular peephole and the author’s name in strong block letters, so I agreed to the trade. …more

I’m not a fan of murder mysteries. Truth is, I just don’t care why someone murdered someone else. Plus there’s the violence (grisly), the sex (cop-on-cop, cop-on-suspect), the conventional motives (jealousy, insanity, payback for molestation), the handful of suspects (lover, neighbor, father), and the revelation that it was…whomever. I don’t care.

Perhaps, then, I’m exactly the kind of reader Tana French set out to pistol-whip when she wrote In the Woods. I’m the cocky, I’ve-seen-it-all snob, who looks down on “page-turners” like they’re the Doritos of literary cuisine, tasty yet empty.

Well, she got me. She got me good. And here’s how she did it. …more

The books I love are those tangled and overflowing: their magic is the product of the trust the author puts in his talent

Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is nothing less than brimming, and it writhes in beauty from first to last; it is difficult to deconstruct its brilliance, which is many-branched. …more

The last book I really truly loved was Charles D’Ambrosio’s second short story collection, The Dead Fish Museum.

I had been looking forward to the release of this book ever since D’Ambrosio’s first collection, The Point, came out in 1995, and even though I had read some of these stories in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories in the years prior to its release, I can’t remember ever being so excited to hold a book in my hands. …more

The last book I loved was Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk by Tony DuShane.

Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk is a triumph, not only for the adolescent Jehovah’s Witness whose voice grows like his first lone pubic hair into a riot but for anyone who has ever felt the spirit of any kind of community; it will remind anyone who has felt the urgings of the heart and stripped naked before love that the rest of the world is something to plunge into even despite the pain and hardship and injustice here. …more

Douglas A. Martin’s Branwell is a novel that bleeds the line between novel and historical fact.

It’s written in a style that traces the tragic story of Branwell Brontë—the lesser known brother in the Brontë family—and composites it through the lives of those involved, from golden child and hope of the family to drunken dissolute, all while the politics of family allegiance drift and Branwell falls further into oblivion. …more

The other day I ran into a student of mine who said “I just read an amazing book.  I loved it.  Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.”  I nodded and agreed, since I had just read the same book, but I felt an interesting reaction rising inside me:  No, no, you did not read it like I read it, did not love it like I loved it; it did not shake you so as it shook me. …more

The Rumpus presents the second installment of an index to “The Last Book I Loved” Series. …more

Since I was a toddler, I had always wanted to be an actor.

It was fun being other people and things, regardless of who watched; as I grew a bit older, I had thought that the characters I pretended to be were far more interesting than who I was. Even now, at 30, I feel that I’m preparing a few roles simultaneously for a production that will never happen. …more

I smoke tinderbox Chartwell aromatic tobacco in my Savinelli pipe; and when I read  a Cormac McCarthy novel, it usually dangles from my mouth longer than it needs to be, and I refill it more than I should.

By the end of a reading session, I’m coughing and gagging like a character in his stories( lets call it “method reading”). …more

‘A writer drew a circle in the sand and stepping into it said “This is my novel,” but the circle, leaping, cut him clean through….’

—from The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera

Looking at the way most African literature is presented to Western readers, you’d be forgiven for believing publishers think African literature has just two things to offer: importance and a lasting sense of virtue. Both?  For the price of a paperback?  Where do I sign up? …more

The last book I loved was Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin.

Martin has always been interesting to me because of the way he teeters between hilarious and laughably unfunny. Take The Jerk. That movie is genuinely funny, but about forty-five minutes in I always think about going to sleep or ordering a burrito. Cruel Shoes walks this line like Mary Lou Retton on a Russian balance beam. It is perfectly and weirdly confident. …more

Read between Faulkner’s Collected Short Stories and the wonderful Martin Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl, it was time for prose that slapped me in the face and welcomed me with a beer. …more

I’m going to say something a reviewer should never say about a series still in development: Berlin is a great book.

We’re only up to book two [Berlin Book One: City Of Stones and Berlin Book Two: City Of Smoke] in a three book series, so I could be shooting myself in the foot later, but right now I can say that Jason Lutes’ work so far is nothing short of amazing. …more

I grabbed An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie from the fabulous New York travel bookstore, Idlewild, after my event with Stephen Elliott. I’d heard about the book for years as an incredible read for anybody who adores anthropology adventure stories. Yes!

Reissued by the New York Review of Books in 2001, and well translated from the French, it opens in Togo with Kpomassie attacked by a snake while throwing coconuts out of a tree. Not a bad set-up. …more

I always blanch when someone tells me — and always so assuredly, it seems — “ I just don’t really like poetry.”It’s more people, more otherwise avid readers than I would like to think.

It’s a matter of personal choice, sure; as much as I try to like reading philosophy I can’t say I do.  But these people who “don’t really like poetry” seem to see it as an art form that’s too indulgent or selfish or extraneous; they feel they can relate more to characters in storylines. I, on the other hand, turn to poetry when I need something to relate to.  I was feeling that need when I passed Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs in a window; I was heartachin’, broke, and a line from a poet I hadn’t read in years kept crossing my mind: …more

I ran away to Barcelona because of a girl.

Also I’d been grumpy and mopey for the previous month or so, due to the whole uncertain future thing, so really the thing with the girl just kind of tipped me over the edge. I figured I could fritter my money away while moping in Edinburgh, or I could fritter it away travelling.

I started reading Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness on my last day in Barcelona. …more

Because you read me, dear reader,
therefore I am; because you read us
(my book and me), dear reader,
therefore we are (You, it and i).

–Francis Ponge

I have come back to it often, this book, whose title is variously translated as Things, The Voice of Things or Taking the Side of Things, not least because it asks me to. Beth Archer’s canny 1972 translation of French writer Francis Ponge’s book of arresting prose poems (though there’s a lot to be said for Cid Corman’s version as well) captures much of the cleverness of the original language while managing to transform the work, through some arcane prosodic alchemy, into something that reads with great verve and elasticity in English. The epigraph to Archer’s translation (which begins this piece) invites readers in with a kind of wit and generosity very much in the spirit of Ponge’s own vision. It’s a poetics that privileges the act of observation as a collaborative process–worthy, daring (and sometimes dangerous) but always worth the risk. …more

•The Feverhead by Wolfgang Bauer is unsurprisingly and unfortunately out of print. As of tonight (October 27, 2009), you can find used copies on Amazon for $7.41.

•One of the novel’s characters is called Captain Ox: he is a single man divided between two bodies, three eyes, and exactly 3.5 meters. Neither of him bears resemblance to himself – or the other? I’ll allow that he may be a symbol, but what explanation is there for the scene in which one of him is kidnapped by monks (at the instigation of a transvestite nun) while both of him is entering a brothel? …more

I read J.M.G Le Clézio’s “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea” over the course of an average day—during meals, on the subway, during slow periods at work—and was afraid to let it end.  When it did, I read it again.

Deborah Treisman’s lovely translation appeared in The New Yorker in October, perfectly timed to Le Clézio’s Nobel Prize win of last fall.  The book of stories from which it was borrowed, Mondo et autres histoires, is still not available in English and thus “The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea,” originally “Celui qui n’avait jamais vu la mer,” is sadly only available in English to be read online, by purchasing an entire digital subscription, or by tracking down a copy of the magazine’s October 27, 2008 issue.  This seems criminal to me. …more

After reading David Foster Wallace’s short story collection, Girl With Curious Hair, I was determined to read Infinite Jest.

I found Wallace’s prose to be unlike anything I had ever read before and even though he used structures or techniques from postmodernism or minimalism, he was using them in order to attempt to do something new and break away from these conventional narrative forms. …more