the last book i loved
-
The 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…
-
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.
-
Jeva 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…
-
The 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…
-
Alex 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…
-
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 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…
-
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…
-
The 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…
-
The 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…
-
Erik 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…
-
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…