Next Door Lived a Girl
First off, this is an extremely graphic book. There is sexual abuse and violence directed at children, and it is dark and extremely graphic. If you are sensitive to that…
Heart of Darkness: Another Hike up the Literary Canon
Another piece of the canon that I’m just now getting to. Still not sure how I made it through my English undergrad without reading this. I guess professors are just…
On the Edge (Edward St. Aubyn)
Edward St. Aubyn’s 1998 novel rather recently got its U.S. release. I bought this book in Powell’s last year and just now got around to it. I have not read…
The Wisdom of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton knows his way around the English language. He often makes it do silly things, purely for his own amusement. His Father Brown books, especially, have a sense of…
Leslie Feinburg’s Stone Butch Blues
This book was put onto a list given to me by a good friend and then put into my hands by that same friend. Stone Butch Blues is a gut…
Gateway to Paradise Revisited, and Further Notes
I recently had a conversation with someone more familiar with this book than myself, and it brought up a few things that I didn’t really address -or that I addressed…
Matthew Vollmer’s Gateway to Paradise
This is the third book of Vollmer’s I’ve read, the most recent, and the one I’d be least likely to recommend. I loved “Inscriptions for Headstones” -it was a fantastically…
Matthew Vollmer’s “Future Missionaries of America”
Future Missionaries of America Matthew Vollmer This was my favorite short story collection of 2016 (of meaning “read during”). Vollmer’s book “Inscriptions for Headstones” was high on my list in…
Djuna Barnes’ “Nightwood” and the virtues of reading good shit you don’t like
Nightwood T.S. Eliot said of Djuna Barnes’ 1936 novel “Nightwood” that “it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it”. There’s a poetic…
The Short Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
http://assets.uvamagazine.org/images/uploads/2015/Spring_2015/BreecePancake.jpg Breece D’J Pancake killed himself at 27. Whenever someone who evidences some kind of brilliance kills themselves (or merely meets an untimely end,) it seems difficult to separate the…