Author Archives: Kasia Bartoszynska

I have an annual tradition of canceling all plans on the first big snow day and reading a book cover to cover. As we were chatting about the forecast last night I was telling friends that I didn’t think I’d be able to do it this time because there’s just too much to do atContinueContinue reading “The Singularity, Dino Buzzati, tr. Anne Milano Appel”

This was fun, though maybe a touch longer than it needed to be. It’s about a college student trying to write an essay for class, and it does brilliantly capture the peculiarities of student life; being isolated and slightly outside of time and absorbed in various emotional dramas. Wanting to be a genius. How theContinueContinue reading “Practice, Rosalind Brown”

I’m currently reading Sarah Mesle’s awesome book Reasons and Feelings with a bunch of colleagues (you know me, I love a book club) and one of the (many) cool things about it is that it makes you think about the different styles and modalities of sharing ideas, and their varying durations and speeds. Lectures areContinueContinue reading “Azadi, Arundhati Roy”

NOTE: Forgive me if I’m repeating myself — I could have sworn that I posted about this book when I read it in SEPTEMBER, but it seems like I didn’t? But I’m feeling such deja vu as I’m typing, I feel like I *must* have said this before? It’s that point of the semester, friends.ContinueContinue reading “TOAF, Renee Gladman”

I think it is almost 2 years ago now that I signed up for a ceramics class with my dear child, and gradually realized that I was far more interested in making pottery than he was, and that I could in fact just sign up for a class on my own. I quickly became kindContinueContinue reading “Old in Art School, Nell Painter”

This is an absolute stunner. Enthralling, complex, surprising at every turn. I actually don’t want to say too much about it because the gradual unfolding is such a pleasure, but the rough sketch is that it’s a novel about a South African family designated by law as Coloured, fighting Apartheid while being internally riven byContinueContinue reading “My Son’s Story, Nadine Gordimer”

This is a long poem, told in mostly rhyming couplets, about a woman who blows her life up by leaving her (seemingly very kind and understanding) boyfriend to pursue an intense love affair with another woman. I couldn’t help chuckling to myself, at times, about how it’s such a quintessentially “cool New Yorker” kind ofContinueContinue reading “Couplets, Maggie Millner”

I’m translating an essay on free indirect discourse in Polish literature that focuses heavily on Żeromski, whom I haven’t read since graduate school, so I thought the time was ripe to revisit his work and got the audiobook of this one for a recent road trip. The opening is incredible — it’s a really remarkableContinueContinue reading “Wierna Rzeka, Stefan Żeromski”

I admittedly haven’t read most of the books that did make the Booker Shortlist, so I’m prepared to be corrected, but for now at least I think it’s a travesty that Endling didn’t make the cut. But I suspect I know why — I imagine that the postmodern meta flourishes make the book seem unseriousContinueContinue reading “Endling, Maria Reva”

“Moja książka jest właśnie propozycja bardziej świadomego bzykania w lesie; połączenie erotycznej energii z miłością do natury i piękna.” Czarujący ale i też czasem wzruszający, nawet filozoficzny przewodnik — raczej zbiór esejów — o seksie na plein airze. Fajnie się czyta.