the last book i loved
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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 abyss hinted at throughout Heise’s alternately gloomy and beautiful poems.
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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 cliché complete, I was looking for myself while living…
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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 my religious (perhaps cultural is a better term) background or…
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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 (though myopically) criticized for never having really solved the novel,…
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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 time I was leaving New York. Given my current state…
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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 woven tight and turns back on itself. I say this…
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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 of In the Blind and Waste, two other bleak miracles,…
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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 some character’s bliss or bitterness, I’m locked out. Disorientation results,…
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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” Brian Remy, who is trying to make sense of the…
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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 on Saturday nights and she’d mentioned that she “worshiped” Harrison. …
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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 now the frantic little bird hatched from therein is pecking…
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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, not coal mining-hard as writers always say, and here am…