Subduction by Kristen Millares Young Subduction by Kristen Millares Young My rating: 4 of 5 stars subduction: n, the action or process in plate tectonics of the edge of one crustal plate descending below the edge of another…
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia My rating: 2 of 5 stars I had high hopes for Mexican Gothic, given I’ve always been a fan of the Gothic novel; while Moreno-Garcia does use Gothic tropes—especially in the first third of the book—the novel soon devolves into a supernatural horror, a genre I’m definitely not a fan of.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor My rating: 5 of 5 stars Holy fuck. Got to keep your wits about you in this world, she pontificated.
The Current by Tim Johnston
The Current by Tim Johnston My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Because it was only girls… In the river. It’s always been only girls.
The Current is not your ordinarily mystery/thriller; in fact, I would strongly discourage those who enter its icy, frozen Minnesotan (and Iowan) world to read it for the mystery, or dissuade those looking for a fast-paced thriller.
What Johnston has written instead are…
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope My rating: 4 of 5 stars
”I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other. It is the same as when women kiss.”
“When I see women kiss, I always think that there is a deep hatred at the bottom of it.”
And so the long, arduous, fitful, endearing, maddening, and epic-filled Chronicles of Barsetshireare at an…
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Speeding through Trollope is never wise: each of his books are long, drawn out performances, where the various threads he weaves throughout eventually come together in the end—the different characters of different social stations and statuses; the bickering family members, neighbors, and parish members; and also the young…
Salvador Dalí, Sketch of Sigmund Freud, 1938
The Hide by Barry Unsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man] The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour…
— Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Josh, or Josiah, is a 20-year-old lower-class youth, working “on the stalls”…
Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.
Richard Siken, Crush
So... Lately I’m not really here or on Twitter anymore, but you can find me on Goodreads. I’m not reviewing much on there, but feel free to follow me if you like, if only to see what I’m reading these days.
A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
Jane Hirshfield, from “A Hand”
Édouard Boubat, Jardin Zen, Kyoto, Japan, 1975
Home is so sad.
Philip Larkin, from “Home Is So Sad” (w/ thanks to @lydiakiesling’s The Golden State)
And if the story sounds so far like a dream, a glossy tale of the kind one occasionally—on holiday or a long-haul flight—allows oneself to lean back into and, as if it were sinful, a praline, vanish within for a brief moment, then it's because life is a dream, a dream from which you never wake up, but which one day is nonetheless suddenly long since over, but you're still here and can either use 'the rest of your days' to forget and 'get on with it' or on the other hand, like me, abandon what is and try to retrieve what was, even the tiniest little thing that has been lost, even what perhaps didn't really exist but nonetheless belongs in the story, call it forth and tell it so it doesn't vanish but on the contrary now at last becomes real and in a way more real than anything else.
Madame Nielsen, The Endless Summer
Tentacle
for A.
we send them both off bare-chested into the den to plug in their machines and watch the images on screens morph into shapes they assume for the duration of the spell in Guadalajara the trees bloom and then wilt spent spine curved like a question mark I send you messages while they are occupied that sound like branches snapping or me lapping up your saliva when he is next to me the…
god is not
the voice in the whirlwind
god is the whirlwind
at the last
judgment we will all be trees
Margaret Atwood, from The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalgia (1983)
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James, from “Madame de Mauves”