Author Archives: Kasia Bartoszynska

Picked this up randomly at the library (the pleasures of the browse! Libraries are magic!), and it was such a cool, strange, eerie book. A surreal road trip adventure story of two queer women, one adolescent and one middle-aged, working through their grief and sorting out who they want to be. Ominous and tender inContinueContinue reading “Are You Listening? Tillie Walden”

I started reading this with a bookclub of wine and cider makers — people who know a lot more than I do about how things grow, in other words, and who are not academics. It was awesome, because it gave me such a different angle on the book. As we joked, whereas they tolerated theContinueContinue reading “The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing”

I had meant to read around in a bunch of graphic novels this summer to make some changes to my class syllabus, but in typical fashion, it was just after I finalized the readings and set up the canvas course and everything that I started tearing through piles of graphic novels. A friend introduced meContinueContinue reading “The Lucky Poor, by Mazie Lovie”

I’m a big fan of Kevin Kwan. He basically writes 18th-century fiction adapted to 21st-century sensibilities, but only just barely. It delights me. Like, Lies and Weddings has a plot that could almost be transplanted wholesale into a Burney novel (if you made everyone white). It’s especially satisfying, too, because it indulges in a deliciousContinueContinue reading “Lies and Weddings, Kevin Kwan”

This is an earthy, engrossing tale, full of surprises, bizarre but frequently moving. Though sprawling in scope, it also seems tightly controlled and skillfully constructed. It reminded me of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound (though I read that book many years ago, so maybe they’re actually quite different…) — both have elements of magicContinueContinue reading “Whale, by Myeong-kwan Cheon, tr. Chi-Young Kim”

Just over a year ago, I was mindlessly scrolling Twitter when I saw this I had done something similar before, reading each of the letters in Richardson’s Clarissa on the day it was written, and I loved the new understanding it gave me of the text in time — a totally different sense of itsContinueContinue reading “Anniversaries, by Uwe Johnson, tr. Damion Searls”

I know that many people think of this as the perfect book, and it is really excellent, but I read The Spare Room first, and liked it even more. This is different — it jumps around a lot, in both time and perspective, and it does so in really interesting ways. But what really makesContinueContinue reading “The Children’s Bach, Helen Garner”

Someone on goodreads wrote “to nie książka, to kołderka!” [This isn’t a book, it’s a blanket!] which is actually a great way to describe it. What a charming, winsome text. It’s the diary of a young queer Jewish guy who works at the zoo, kept from 2013-2023. The entries are brief and sporadic — it’sContinueContinue reading “Pawilon Małych Ssaków, Patryk Pufelski”

I made my bookclub read this, and I was a little worried that it would be a bit too wacky and experimental for their tastes, but I needn’t have been — they mostly wanted to ask me a ton of questions about translation theory and publishing. Which may seem like a knock on the novel,ContinueContinue reading “The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft”

I first read pieces of this book in college, in the Intro to Lit Theory course that I took with Bill Ray (a class that really rocked my world, both when I took it and then again, repeatedly, when I thought back on it over the years. How much I learned there! How little IContinueContinue reading “Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa”