David Peak: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, Horror Vacui
This is the one I return to, sometimes several times a year. The term “Horror Vacui” has two definitions, both of which serve as a useful framework while skirting the…
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the last book i loved
205 posts
The Last Book I Loved: Hopscotch
Would I find Cortazar? But I wasn’t really looking for Cortazar when I read his masterpiece, Hopscotch. I was, I’m sorry to say, looking for myself. And just to make…
The Last Book I Loved: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
If you couldn’t tell by the last name of “Cohen,” I am a Jew. And not surprisingly, I find myself with a proclivity for Jewish-American fiction. Maybe it’s because of…
Larry Fahey: The Last Book I Loved, Bullet Park
I should say at the outset that while Bullet Park is a good book, and in my opinion a great book, it is not a sound book. Cheever is rightly…
The Last Book I Loved: The House of Mirth
It’s fitting that I only finally read The House of Mirth, Wharton’s great novel about the decline and fall of a socialite by the name of Lily Bart, around the…
Rebecca K. O’Connor: The Last Book I Loved, Tapping the Source
It’s never too late to read a book you should have read when you were 21, or to find a lost love or to realize that everything is interlinked and…
Snowden Wright: The Last Book I Loved, Firework
In Firework, a novel that starts in the gutter and never once looks at the stars, Eugene Marten accomplishes two extraordinary feats. Not only does the book establish Marten, author…
Barbara J. King: The Last Book I Loved, Memory Wall
Short stories have never attracted me; the shock of moving from one to the next is too great. Just as I submerge fully in a new world, floating along on…
The Last Book I Loved: The Zero
Not in recent memory have I read a book so enthralling, heartbreaking and with such deadpan humor. In what he calls his “9/12” novel, Jess Walter’s The Zero follows “hero cop”…
Jonathan Pappas: The Last Book I Loved, The English Major
When Jim Harrison’s The English Major was published a few years ago, I was working at the Cedar Tavern in New York. Sarah was the woman I tended bar with…
Alex V. Cook: The Last Book I Loved, The Last Novel
I finished off The Last Novel while sitting poolside suffering a monstrous earache, the kind that feels like someone pushed an egg into your ear while you were asleep and…
Kathleen Heil: The Last Book I Loved, Out of Sheer Rage
It seems only appropriate that I put off writing this essay for several months despite the fact that sitting down to write it sooner really wouldn’t have been that hard,…