by H. Leighton Dickson It’s rare for a story to really stop me in my tracks early on but, with Cold Stone and Ivy, Dickson did something that I was beginning to think I’d never see outside a Kurt Vonnegut story, and she did it in a way that was utterly foreign to me. You…
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by Gore Vidal Where to begin with this one? It’s not even that I have a hard time expressing my opinion of Duluth––it’s really good––but I find it difficult to explain why I found Vidal’s surrealist satire as enjoyable as I did. And, even though I walked away with such respect for the story and…
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by Charles Bukowski In Pulp, we join Nick Belane, private eye “extraordinaire”––the best dick in L.A., by his own account––as he attempts to solve several cases, which quite often entails sitting there, drinking, and musing on how he should be solving cases. He meets Lady Death, who wants him to investigate a man who looks…
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by Jack Kerouac There’s something inexplicably beautiful in Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. It sometimes contains dated jargon, awkward phrases, and run-on sentences, but there’s this raw clarity in his descriptions that I find so endearing. While the author’s writing in The Dharma Bums may not have touched me as consistently as that of On the Road,…
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The High Mountains of Portugal is split into three parts, each part making up a different era of the 20th century, connected through the isolated region in Portugal they all concern. A man journeys there in search of a forgotten religious artifact in the first; a pathologist performs an autopsy while the deceased’s widow observes…
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by Kazuo Ishiguro An Artist of the Floating World very much reminds me of A Pale View of Hills, in that the story involves an elder looking back on their life, often unreliably. The unreliable narrator this time around is Masuji Ono, an artist who was celebrated and respected before and during the Second World…
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by P. G. Wodehouse Boy, do I love me some Wodehouse. Of course, I have only read two of his near one hundred works, so this love could be highly conditional and potentially fleeting, but, so far, he’s batting a thousand. For, so far, his stories possess a great mix of wit and absurdities, in…
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by Franz Kafka The inclusion of quite a few posthumously published works in Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories fills me with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, given that Kafka requested that his unpublished stories be destroyed after his death, I feel as though I have no right to look upon them. As a…
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edited by Nora Gallagher and Lisa Myers Don’t let it be said that I’m a closed-minded person, but, given all my constant reading, I’ve begun to get a better feel of what I’m likely to enjoy and those that set off my cynicism. And my apprehension was almost palpable when I first picked up Tools…
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by Philip K. Dick You can really feel the influence of William Burroughs and Ken Kesey on a work like A Scanner Darkly. While I would assume this comes from Dick having read and being a big fan of the aforementioned authors, it could just as reasonably stem from being a part of the drug…
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