The Last Book I Loved: The Telling
After what seems like a lifetime of bracing and bottling, I’ve gotten closer to settling my fourth-grade trauma.
...more
Posts Tagged: the last book i loved
The Last Book I Loved: After Birth
I wanted what Ari wanted: affirmation that I could be a good mother while making mistakes and having ugly, difficult thoughts.
...more
The Last Book I Loved: Beautiful Ruins
I’d been treated for cancer, left my husband, patched things up, and just as life was veering back towards Normalville, it took a headlong swerve.
...more
THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE
Is it wrong to have ideas? This is the central question at the heart of Kingfishers.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, a little creative encouragement from Grant Snider to jump start August. Then, in this review, Andrew Fulmer examines Jeff Alessandrelli’s use of the poetic “factoid.” Alessandrelli makes a series of successful allusions in his collection, This Last Time Will Be The First. It is a “contemporarily fresh” collection that deserves our attention, Fulmer argues. And in the latest The Last […]
...more
The Last Book I Loved: Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The way LTGWS lovingly caressed every carnal description of Manhattan’s byways and alleys, tenement flats, assisted-living towers, and half-way houses was a revelation in today’s post-Minimalist world.
...more
THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: The Original 1982 by Lori Carson
I was only starting to let myself feel what I had lost 14 years earlier, when I had reluctantly placed our third child – the only one I managed to deliver – with an adoptive family. Like Lori Carson, I was love-haunted. Unlike Carson, I had no words.
...more
THE LAST BOOK I LOVED: WONDER BOYS BY MICHAEL CHABON
Michael Chabon’s career is often the work of a writer hell-bent on destroying the line between “literary” and “genre,” and his most famous work is an epic adventure novel about comic-book creators.
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: The Geographical History of America by Gertrude Stein
I’m quite sure that if I lived when Gertrude Stein did, I would have not enjoyed her person—the pronouncements, the relentless self-promotion, the blatant self-absorption (“I am a genius”). If I lived in her time I probably, like so many else then, would not have enjoyed her writing either—the repetitions, the lack of story, the […]
...more
The Last Book I Loved: The Unnamed
Little bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation.
...more
The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers—especially once-famous, forgotten ones.
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: Small Porcelain Head
The first time I read Allison Benis White’s Small Porcelain Head, I was screening manuscripts for a book prize on my honeymoon. Admittedly, it’s an odd way to celebrate nuptials, but I thought I might read some of the manuscripts during afternoons on the beach. My husband left our room to get us a bottle […]
...more
The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
[I]f ever there was a book that should be judged by its cover, it’s this one.
...moreJeva Lange: The Last Book I Loved, Life of Pi
Neither of my parents finished reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. My father abandoned the novel halfway through, pleading boredom, and my mother couldn’t get past the first few chapters due to her infamously weak stomach and a detailed lesson in tiger dangerousness. I, on the other hand, raced through the book as soon as […]
...moreThe Last Web Comic I Loved: Forming by Jesse Moynihan
As a fiction writer, I sometimes get jealous of the storytelling freedom in comics. With prose writing, everyone seems determined to fit stories into predefined boxes. A work must be “literary” or it must be “genre,” it must be “science fiction” or it must be “fantasy,” it must be “serious” or it must be “comedy,” […]
...moreAlex Gallo-Brown: The Last Book I Loved, Magic Hours
Magic Hours, Tom Bissell’s recent collection of non-fiction, surveys his magazine writing over the last decade or so. It is a genre, he informs us in the Author’s Note, he fell into more or less accidentally; it is also the genre for which he has become best known. “Earlier in my career, I was neurotic […]
...more
Mark Ellis: The Last Book I Loved, I Am Ozzy
As a lifelong Ozzy fan, I scarfed down his memoir like a stoner polishing off a bag of Doritos. I Am Ozzy turned out to be a pretty good read, at least that’s what I thought. A week after finishing the book I got curious about what other people were saying about it. The reviews […]
...more
Betsy Stewart: The Last Book I Loved, Birds of America: Stories
I am a voyeur to the core. Keep your house lit at night and I will peer in to see how you spend your time alone, or what colors you’ve painted your walls. Invite me in and I will pick through your bookshelves and look at all your family photos on the mantle while you make me a drink. Ask me to stay and I will rummage through your things for what you’ve been hiding in those closets of yours. Write me a book with characters who are so real and precisely drawn that I can feel their warmth in the seat next to me, and I will sign out of Facebook and devour it.
...moreTeow Lim Goh: The Last Book I Loved, Storming the Gates of Paradise
Three years ago, I bought Rebecca Solnit’s essay collection, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, on a lark. At that time I was beginning to write, trying to find my voice. Three years before that, I had moved from the Midwest to Colorado with the boy I would much later marry. I took […]
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: Never Let Me Go
The problem with writing about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is that I can’t discuss the plot. A blend of science fiction and literary narrative, the novel hinges on a secret, a secret so all-encompassing and imposing, so carefully revealed, that if I were to divulge it, I would ruin the book.
That being said, here’s what I can tell you…
...moreThe Last Book (Collection) I Loved: The Ken Kesey Collection
What would the man who said, “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” think about becoming a museum piece? The quote, by Ken Kesey, appears in the first chapter of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of Kesey and his cohorts’ legendary Day-Glo bus journey across America and the widespread explorations […]
...moreErik Evenson: The Last Book I Loved, Last Night
I am here to do two things: scream the praises of James Salter, and throw a few questions about his place in the larger scope of literature into the mix. How did I make it through a college lit class that taught authors from the second half of the twentieth century and never hear of James Salter?
...more
Richard Santos: The Last Book I Loved, A Perfect Spy
I wanted a genre book. You know, just a quick zip through something exciting, and heavy on plot and action—maybe not so deep with all that poeticism and character development stuff. My first mistake was picking a book by one of those respected genre writers. John le Carré has been around for decades, he’s written […]
...more
David Peak: The Last Book I Loved, Birch Hills at World’s End
Every high school has a kid like Erik. He’s sharp, dark, and charming. Add in the fact that he has his own car and impeccable taste in Scandinavian metal, and who better to befriend during the darkest years of your life? Even if he seems a little unhinged, or if his customized tabletop war game, complete with rules that revolve around […]
...more
Adam Parker Cogbill: The Last Book I Loved, Abbott Awaits
I am as guilty as any other reader I know of opening or hijacking conversations with some derivation of, “You know what you should read?” I can’t help myself; I read something I loved, and I want to share. There is also an unfortunate correlation between how transformative the reading experience was and how vigorously […]
...more
The Last Book I Loved: The Cat’s Table
For years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man from Colombia whose mustache is even more impressive than my father’s, a shy Chinese man who twice brought me folded paper fans, a thin young […]
...moreThe Last Book I Loved: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
There is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie Nolan, the book’s protagonist, is described as the sum of many parts. A genetic and experiential palimpsest, Francie:
...moreSarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
Truman Capote famously said that what Jack Kerouac did wasn’t writing, but typing. I take just as much offense today to this slander as I did ten years ago as an undergraduate when first hearing it quoted by an English professor.
...moreRimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
I had read the book months ago. And then, standing in front of Edward Hopper’s “The House by the Railroad” at the Museum of Modern Art, I found myself trying to explain to a tango-friend from South Africa why this painting—one she wanted to walk past without more than a cursory glance—was important. I wished […]
...moreMolly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
I was ten years old when 1999 became 2000. My knowledge of the Y2K problem was vague; I could only glean a nebulous mood of panic from overheard newscasts and conversations between adults. My own parents did not seem worried. We went to New Year’s Eve festivities at a family friend’s house. I was part […]
...more