Monthly Archives: June 2022

A taut, quick, quasi thriller. You kind of know what’s coming, yet you’re continuously surprised. The narrator is in many ways cliché (a jealous husband pursuing an affair with a younger woman), and yet somehow compelling. A lot of reviewers on goodreads are like UGH this is why I don’t read books by MEN andContinueContinue reading “The Woman from Uruguay, by Pedro Mairal, tr. Jenny Croft”

I was jokingly thinking to myself that the only way you could get me to read history like this is to illustrate it, but actually, this was still a bit of a slog. And maybe that’s because the story isn’t told in as engaging a way as it could be. Humbolt’s story is pretty incredible,ContinueContinue reading “The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, Andrea Wulf, Lillian Melcher”

I don’t write often about academic monographs on here, because the audience is much smaller, but this is truly one of the most exciting and brilliant scholarly works that I’ve read in awhile, so I really feel obligated to spread the word. Cohen uses the idea of “the Indies” — the seemingly odd pairing ofContinueContinue reading “The Global Indies, Ashley Cohen”

So many short story collections these days get described as “genre-defying” and “surreal”, and honestly, it doesn’t make me want to read them, but this one was long-listed for the Booker International Prize, which I’m generally more interested in (and this year’s list was especially good), and then I learned that the author translates RussianContinueContinue reading “Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur”