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Book Review: The Other City by Michal Ajvaz
The idea of another city or world on the fringes of our own, accessible only at night to those who are particularly astute in feeling that they don’t belong, will be familiar to readers of magical realism and fantasy fiction. But Michal Ajvaz’s novel The Other City does not take this idea into the fantastical ...
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Book Vs. Film ~ Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a great writer not because he gives each of his readers a window into a world, but because he gives them a vista. His masterful, take-my-hand-and-I’ll-take-you-there style invites each one of us into the verdant sprawl of South American jungles, festering humid air, lands ripe with fruits and fauna, as well ...
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Book Review: Woolgathering by Patti Smith
New Directions rereleased Patti Smith’s tiny book Woolgathering last year with more writing and new photographs in a hardcover: the back reproduces the lines, “Everything contained in this little book is true, and written just like it was. The writing of it drew me from my strange torpor and I hope that in some measure ...
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Book vs. Film – Of Human Bondage
It was difficult reconciling with my favorite author after discovering he may have been Hollywood’s first in a long tradition of sell-outs. W. Somerset Maugham was the novelist who Orwell described as, “The modern writer who has influenced me the most”, praising his ability to tell a straightforward story without frills; in other words, a ...
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Interview: Milenko Milanovic, author of Slow Dying
Milenko Milanovic is the author of Slow Dying: The Bosnia War Prison Camp at Visoko, reviewed here. Tell me about the book: My book is an interesting personal story, and it is unusual. I have been working on that book for approximately 10 years, trying to find a publisher or agent. I wasn’t so lucky! ...
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Book Review: Slow Dying by Milenko Milanovic
The Bosnian War was, on the surface, a war over territory; but the conflict divided people along ethnic lines, pitting neighbors against neighbors in some of the worst atrocities and violences of ethnic cleansing since WWII. Reporting of the war was propagandistic in the Balkans and the West, painting the conflict with a heavy anti-Serbian ...
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Book vs. Film – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
For my eighteenth birthday, I was given fifty or so books as a present by various family and friends. I’d been a heavy reader most of my life, but these books represented a change from the easy fiction I’d been accustomed to reading into, marking a more serious step towards literature. All of the gifted ...
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Book Review: You Must Go and Win by Alina Simone
Alina Simone is a musician first, not a writer, and this makes her the perfect tour guide through the ups and downs of trying to make it as an indie singer. Her musical style is sad-folksy (Make Your Own Danger is a great album, if you like to listen while you read), but her writing ...
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Book Review: The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein
It’s a sad fact of the times that many college graduates aren’t getting jobs, moving back in with their parents in the interim. And while “interim” is the key word, especially to understanding The Fallback Plan, I got it in my head at the start of the novel that I’d be reading about a 22-year-old ...
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Book Review: Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith
Alexis M. Smith’s short novel Glaciers is a Tin House New Voice, hailed by the press as “delicate,” “haunting,” and “glinting.” I agree that the debut is, all in all, a very pretty piece of work. The prose is wistful yet crystal-cut in a way that makes the internal monologues and thoughts sparkle, and the ...
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Book Review: Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is probably best read not during either of those times, but instead during the twilight hour when you might look up from a particular fantastic story and forget whether the day is ending or just beginning. Ben Loory’s stories are just a few pages each, and ...
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Little Free Libraries
I go to the Boston Public Library to do work because it is quiet, cavernous, and filled with books that simultaneously help me and distract me. It’s here that I will occasionally sign out a book to read for pleasure, though mostly I use my card to get texts I need for class. I go ...