Author Archives: Kasia Bartoszynska

The premise of this novel is that a young woman wakes up to find that she has written Baudelaire’s complete works. But it’s not a gimmicky postmodern sort of book — more like a beautiful, meandering meditation on being a woman artist. I loved it.

My soon-to-be-6-year-old child generally refuses to watch movies, preferring various youtube videos (of people unboxing toys, or playing with toys, or computer-generated animations of balls rolling down ramps, or very amateurish films with weird little plots — all kinds of things. I understand this is A Thing with this generation, but it is so deeplyContinueContinue reading “Ponyo”

The thought crossed my mind, as I was reading this, that it’s sort of funny how you can basically get me to read a history textbook if it includes loads of illustrations. This is obviously an oversimplification, but it’s true that graphic novels (or rather, graphic narratives) are increasingly being recognized as an effective wayContinueContinue reading “We Hereby Refuse, Abe, Nimura, Ishikawa, Sasaki”

I picked this up because we were going to spend a few days in LA (I love reading books that are connected to the places I travel to), and read it on the plane with great pleasure. The voice won me over immediately, from the fantastic opening line — “One summer morning while I wasContinueContinue reading “LA Woman, Eve Babitz”

I’ve been reading this slowly for over a year now — read a chapter, think on it, go back and re-read, think some more. Then I was working on an essay and realized that parts of the book were echoing in my head, and so I started trying to think with it, and found myselfContinueContinue reading “Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick”

I was looking for an absorbing and fun book to celebrate the end of the semester, so I tore right through this. It’s an odd novel, one that’s weaving together three major strands through the story of one character, a graduate student who is on the verge of getting married and also trying to finishContinueContinue reading “New People, Danzy Senna”

I loved the Wrinkle in Time books when I was a kid, and then as a teenager, I was thrilled to discover that L’Engle had also written books for young adults, and I happily devoured those as well. So when I saw this short story collection in the new books display of my college’s library,ContinueContinue reading “The Moment of Tenderness, Madeleine L’Engle”

This was both more and less interesting than I expected it to be. Coming hot off a widely discussed New Yorker article that also delves into the non-typical living arrangements and relationships of a woman intellectual whom many consider deeply unlikable, I was sort of expecting to think more about “genius” and social conventions, andContinueContinue reading “Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez”

There’s a slightly Madlibs-ish quality to these poems, in that various words are utterly incongruous, such that they almost seem like a joke. But (like good Madlibs!), they’re also pretty great. They are often playing with tropes from fairy tales, with a distinctly witchy twist.All of this might make it sound like they’re primarily plotContinueContinue reading “The Nightgown and Other Poems, Taisia Kitaiskaia”

This novel puzzled me in tantalizing ways — it did all kinds of things that I didn’t expect, and that didn’t quite make sense; which I was tempted to say were flaws, but that came to seem essential. The novel has an irregular structure: four parts, the first with two chapters, the next two withContinueContinue reading “Afterlives, Abdulrazak Gurnah”