It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days. Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.” The...
In my novel, In Flight, the main character, Robert Besch, suffers from a severe psychological disturbance called dissociative fugue—“a form of amnesia characterized by temporary loss of your identity and unplanned travel or wandering without apparent purpose.” It is typically triggered by extreme stress or emotional trauma. Robert survives a harrowing plane crash and risks his life to save fellow...
I was late getting around to it, but I just finished reading The Sympathizer, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a conflicted Vietnamese communist double agent struggling with his identity while living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. This post isn’t a review of the novel, which I found compelling. It’s simply an opportunity for me to point out excellent...
One thing I love about going to a bookstore such as City Lights in San Francisco—that original haven of the Beat Generation writers—is that I’m sure to walk out of there with a novel I’m not going to find at other, more mainstream bookstores. In this case, I bought the 2001 novel Platform by Michel Houellebecq, who I’ve never read and who is considered France’s most celebrated and controversial...
After winning the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey said in an interview with the Guardian, “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.” I...
The vampire never ceases to both fascinate and repulse. Eastern European folklore offered tales of reanimated corpses and blood-drinking spirits. In 1819, John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the first published vampire story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), still widely read today, established many enduring vampire tropes such as vulnerability to sunlight and the power of seduction. In modern times...
I’ve been reading novels from the past that I believe could never be published today due to potential cultural appropriation, offensiveness, misogynistic themes, lack of political correctness, or some other enlightened objection that has diluted the variety and depth of what major publishing houses are bringing to the market and serves as a supply side-form of book censorship. But that’s just my...
Paul, Jimmy, and I formed a three-person film club to support our recently re-opened local independent movie theater, The Spectrum. We committed to attending a film together every month. Last night was our first go, and we brought along my niece, Ani, who was visiting. It was Paul’s idea for the club, so he got to choose the first movie: Anora, a genre mashup I’ll call a romdramedy—romance...
To fill in the time I no longer spend reading disturbing news I’m reading more fiction, which can also be disturbing but at least is made up. I finished Peter Heller’s “Burn” in just a few days. Heller writes literary adventure novels. His first novel, “The Dog Stars,” is about a pilot navigating life in a dystopian America where most people have died in a plague. I thought it was excellent. But...
I’ll admit what few American male writers of my generation would or could: I’ve never read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or its follow-up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. No excuses, it just didn’t happen. Those novels were never assigned in English. Maybe as a young teen I picked them up on my own and something about the style or voice didn’t grab me. That’s my best guess...
Another innovative writer has died. Beginning in the late 1960s, Robert Coover emerged as a star of metafiction—fiction rejects narrative conventions and realism. It uses language, style, and structure to point out the artificiality of itself. Last week, I wrote about “To Whom It May Concern:” by another metafiction god, Raymond Federman. This week, Robert Coover, who just passed away at age 92...
I earned my MA at the University of Buffalo in the writing program chaired by Raymond Federman—a name you’ve likely never heard. Federman was born in 1928 in France and at age fourteen his parents hid him in a closet while the German Gestapo rounded up the Jews in Paris and sent them to perish in the Nazi death camps. Federman survived. His parents and siblings did not. Federman went on to become...
Midlife crisis novels are nothing new, but Miranda July’s “All Fours” is. Typically when you think of a midlife crisis, what comes to mind might be the frustrated husband who buys his sports car and has an affair, or the neglected wife who searches for meaning after her children are grown or visits the plastic surgeon. “All Fours” blows those tropes to smithereens in a bold and erotic tale about...
Occasionally someone leaves an interesting novel in my Little Free Library—and I snatch it up. This time it was Brooklyn, by the Irish writer Colm Toíbín, published in 2009. The timing was perfect because Toíbín just published a sequel to Brooklyn, which is now on my list to read. Until now, I hadn’t had a chance to read Brooklyn, but back in 2015 I saw and greatly admired the movie based...
The love triangle fascinates me. It’s a classic storytelling device because it comes with built-in drama, tension, and excitement. It radiates sex, secrets, and heartache. What more can you want from a story? Rick, Ilsa, and Laslo in Casablanca. Jay, Daisy, and Tom in The Great Gatsby. Vampire, Werewolf, and Bella in the Twilight series. The love triangle never stops delivering. I’ve been...
