Posts by: Matt McGregor
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, by Jose Saramago
Initially published in Portugal in 1976, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is one of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s first novels. He was fifty-four when he wrote it, and had spent most of life, as our translator Giovanni Pontiero puts it, doing “various manual jobs.”
...moreAgainst an Ethical Machine
Rejected by the early Soviet state, Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky published only nine stories in his lifetime; luckily his novel The Letter Killers Club is now available in English.
...moreMonster Party
Lizzy Acker’s first book of stories Monster Party depicts lost adults, drifting into the coming storm.
...moreGet Off Your Ass and Blow Shit Up
The Avian Gospels is a strange, compelling parable about an authoritarian city-state, an underground resistance, and a plague of mysterious birds.
...moreThe Man Who Guarded the Bomb
Gregory Orfalea’s collection of linked stories demonstrates that conventions are there for a reason—and it’s often harder to follow the rules than to break them.
...moreWe’ll Make Great Pets
In Don LePan’s dystopian novel, the animals are all extinct and the weaker people have taken their place in the food chain.
...moreHeart of Glass
Ali Shaw’s novel concerns a modern-day Midas, a cold and inhospitable island, and a young woman whose body is inexorably transforming.
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The Bigness of the World
There’s a lot to smile at in The Bigness of the World, Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Conner Award-winning collection—but there aren’t a lot of jokes. In fact, over the course of a dozen stories, Ostlund presents all kinds of suffering: death, self-mutilation, jail, child abuse, poverty, and an overabundance of breakups. As the title suggests, Bigness […]
...moreNot-So-Ancient History
A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
...moreIf Only Nothing Would Grow
It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention—Nog honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life.
...moreGenre Trap
Spanish author Javier Calvo’s novel critiques pop culture by embracing its stereotypes
...moreThe Age of Orphans
Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd
...moreJ.M.G Le Clezio’s The Book of the Flights
Second Place in the Rumpus College Book Review Contest Apparently it’s now possible, forty years after the first release of The Book of Flights, to see experimental fiction—like Marxism, feminism, political protests and disco—as a mildly embarrassing historical quirk.
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