Fiction
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Wildwood Imperium
Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
A jam-packed finale to this trilogy set in a version of Portland where Forest Park is the Impassable Wilderness, a magical land most humans in the city can’t physically enter. After establishing a new set of characters and new thread of narrative in the second book, this one starts with yet another new thread. It makes the story get...more
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
Lately I’ve been reading a bunch of queer poetry and apparently also fiction involving ghosts as characters. Like Katalin Street, Jesmyn Ward’s third novel involves spirits of those who have passed on but haven’t entirely departed the company of the living. Here they are a...more
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Katalin Street
Magda Szabó
Fragmented and a bit confusing while meeting all the characters, Katalin Street spans key moments before, during, and after the German occupation of Budapest for three intertwined families in Budapest. Before the war, they have an idyllic life as neighbors in three row houses on Katalin Street, and the novel portrays the effects of...more
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Forest Dark
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love has been a standby favorite I recommend to people often — something I’ve noted while writing about every subsequent book of hers that I’ve read. Realizing now that it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve read it makes me think it’s time for a re-read, especially...more
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Under Wildwood
Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
When I read the first book in this trilogy, I made a comment about reading this second part “at my earliest convenience,” which turned out to be about five years later. This volume explores more areas of the fantastical land of Wildwood, where people and anthropomorphized animals coexist. It is a...more
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The First Rule of Punk
Celia C. Pérez
I am 100% biased with this book, as Celia is a longtime friend. But while it could be possible that I loved this solely from seeing Celia’s heart and humor within the narrative, she has been getting so much amazing feedback (including...more
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Pond
Claire-Louise Bennett
Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again…
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A Safe Girl to Love
Casey Plett
Epigraphs rarely feel undeniably necessary to me; they are interesting, but I assume they mean more to the author than the reader in most cases. Casey Plett’s epigraph for her debut collection of short stories (an excerpt from Michelle Tea’s The Chelsea Whistle) so perfectly sets the tone for the book and provides the...more
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Enigma Variations
André Aciman
A novel that takes its name from an Edward Elgar orchestral piece, the variations here are different romances from fragmented eras of the narrator Paul’s life. Though the novel progresses linearly, each chapter really exists as its own story with only passing references...more
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The Idiot
Elif Batuman
Essentially a novel in two parts, the first comprises Selin’s first year at Harvard in the year 1995, as Selin chooses to study linguistics and Russian, meets a Hungarian mathematician, Ivan, begins emailing Ivan, and develops a crush on him through their correspondence. They have an awkward flirtation, being painfully...more