Impressions of Horror Saterstrom, Selah (2004). The Pink Institution. St. Paul, MN: Coffee House Press. This experimental novel features four generations of Mississippi females from 1940 to the early 2000’s. They are shown in a set of impressions, poems, quotations … Continue reading
Haunting Characters In Search of a Story Duras, Marguerite (1985). The Lover. New York: Random. In Saigon, before the Vietnam war, an impoverished, naive, adolescent French girl acquires an older Chinese lover. Her family is struggling with subsistence, and he … Continue reading
A Slog Through Marital Muck Hadley, Tessa (2011). The London Train. New York: Harper Collins. Nothing happens in this family drama about strained marriages and estranged children, unless you think those kind of events count as “something happening.” Seems like … Continue reading
Literary Mind Games Borges, Jorge Luis (1962). Ficciones. New York: Grove.This collection of seventeen stories in English is a good introduction to the involuted mind of Borges. The stories revel in paradox and self-reference; they dwell on infinities and recursions, … Continue reading
What Is Western Writing? Jaffe, Marc (Ed.) (2007). Best Stories of the American West: Volume I. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. These twenty stories are set in the western U.S. and usually involve horses, cows, or Indians. The writers include … Continue reading
An Early Sensitive Psychopath Fowles, John. (1963). The Collector. New York: Back Bay/Little Brown. This novel is often compared to Lolita because it involves an older man’s sexual obsession with a young girl, but the comparison is not apt. First, … Continue reading