the last book i loved

William Gaddis is one of those writers I’ve been hearing about for years, a writer’s writer of difficult but rewarding fiction, a post-modern master. The Recognitions is considered his masterpiece, but it’s a huge, intimidating book, so I picked up…

The first time I read The Lake by Daniel Villasenor I was fifteen, crunched into the backseat of our tiny family Chrysler and on my way to Georgia. I’d plucked the book off a library shelf because it had the…

I love magic. Be it imagining myself wandering the hills of Narnia or riding a rickety boat on Earthsea’s fog ridden waters—I just want it so bad. I want to be in the club, know the secret, feel sorry for…

The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin is a great piece of Soviet satire, a sub-genre of which there’s plenty to love. Like the host of Russian satirists that preceded him–Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov–Sorokin jumps in impish dance around a host of unspeakable…

I used to think I was somewhat daring as a reader, but apparently I was not. After reading Barry Hannah’s story collection Airships, I bought five of his other books in a flurry of excitement; then they sat there on…

I just had another read of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, because I admire it and because I sought two specific paragraphs from the novel. I wanted to read them again. With our everydayness so saturated with news media and opinion…

I was going to write this piece about A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, which is also a very good book, one that I loved, and one I recommend you read. I recently Netflixed “Apocalypse Now,” which for some…

“Followed by scowls and protestations, (the doctor) left the committee-room. Some minutes later, as he was driving down a black street redolent of fried fish and urine, a woman screaming in agony, her groin dripping blood, stretched her arms toward…

When it comes to books, I believe in love at first sentence. Or maybe first paragraph, but something triggers inside me after reading an opening in a book that really hits home and soon, too soon, I’m falling in love.