Category: Uncategorized
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The Trees by Percival Everett
To me, few authors come off as thoughtful or as wise as Percival Everett. His brilliance comes through most often in his sharp humor, but it’s clear that he’s also a master technician with great emotional insight, is very well-read in literary and linguistic theory, and most importantly, tells a great story. In short, the…
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Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke
Having only run into extended uses of “instant-messaging as dialogue or plot movement” writing in young adult fiction, I was somewhat skeptical about whether Several People Are Typing could be something that I’d get into. I think you could make a good argument that this book is also both a pandemic and internet novel –…
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The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
It’s unlikely that I forget the phrase “wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’”, anytime soon, and I highly doubt whether that’s a good thing for my literary brain. For the luckily unfamiliar, I am referring to this tweet from Joyce Carol Oates: Around the time that she tweeted this, Patricia Lockwood (the patron saint of…
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Drifts by Kate Zambreno
11/13 gloomy weather (allergies plus depression) absolutely kicking my ass today. reading Drifts, by Kate Zambreno and i think i like it, though i wonder how little one can contribute to a work while still having it taken seriously. most seriousness comes through kafka and wittgenstein. holding it against zambreno though feels unfair, since she…
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The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
In case the content warning wasn’t enough of a hint, Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen, is probably the darkest, heaviest book to get written up on this here blog. The three of us read some fairly bleak, disturbing books on a pretty regular basis though, so I’m sure there will be more to come. And…
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the Uncool postmodern
Twice in Lee Konstantinou’s The Last Samurai ReRead, he comes close to saying the quiet part out loud. First, in the preface, “I first read the book in 2007, thinking I might want to include it in a project I was writing about novelists who were trying to move beyond postmodernism,” (Konstantinou 2022, xiii). Then…
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a more formal introduction
one of the reasons i started this blog is that i am in a masters program that will require me to write a thesis and i don’t know what my thesis is going to be about. i do my best thinking through writing and i have a lot of thinking to do in the next…
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humanities core readings, or manifest(o)ing something new
“Before the Appropriation of Land, he who gathered as much of the wild Fruit, killed, caught or tamed, as many of the Beasts as he could; he that is so employed his Pains about any of the spontaneous Products of Nature, as anyway to alter them, from the state which Nature put them in by…
colin lavery 