by Doug Diaczuk I honestly can’t get a lot of writing done in three days. (It probably took me about that long to write this review.) And here comes Diaczuk, the show-off. Not only did he write a book over that period, not only did that story win the 38th 3-Day Novel Contest, but that…
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by Dave Eggers Let’s talk briefly about gender in writing. (I’m hoping I can broach this subject in a way that doesn’t sound ignorant.) At this time, I’m specifically concerned about how the gender of the author relates to narrators and protagonists. You see, whether an author focuses on characters who share their gender or…
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by Joan Thomas One problem with overanalyzing everything, as I tend to do, is that deeper meanings aren’t always readily apparent after a single reading. In the example of The Opening Sky, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the heavy-handed environmentalist preaching that suddenly appears partway in. Was this merely a measure of…
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by Patrick deWitt Well, this one was a doozy. I really don’t know what I was expecting going into this book, but, after reading The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor, it sure caught me by surprise. And I kind of wish I was a bit prepared for a story as depressing as Ablutions turned out…
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by Michael Christie It’s hard to write a good plot twist. It feels a bit odd to be talking about this again so soon, but it seems like an important thing to discuss with regards to Christie’s book. If you give away too much information, a careful reader will catch wind of it long before…
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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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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 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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by William Faulkner The more I read, the more I seem to catch while reading. It wasn’t until my second read-through of Naked Lunch that I really feel I began to appreciate it, and even the recent rereading of Animal Farm really made me feel that at least some of my study of literature is…
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by André Alexis I often go on about the best stories being the ones to elicit the strongest emotions, and probably the clearest indicator that an author has succeeded at this is by making me cry. Alexis’ novel is a unique case where this is concerned, not simply because he made me cry, but because…
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