This is a blog about books and reading
“Any story, any work of literature, any storytelling endeavour has to be both lighthouse and storm,” El Akkad says.
A breezy, plot-driven book and an abstruse, philosophically dense ontological mystery provide different pleasures for readers.
The novel, which won the 2021 Man Booker International Prize, questions where duty and friendship end and insanity begins.
The novel is among a series of recent thrillers that focus on writers behaving badly.
Huysmans shared his protagonist’s disgust with humanity and longed to create a new kind of literature.
Nominally a hardboiled noir, Hummingbird Salamander is also a cri de coeur about our current ecological crisis.
In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.
“For 2,000 years or more, women in literature have been represented as the spoils of war,” says Echlin about one impression she wanted to correct by writing this novel.
Who Is Maud Dixon? is about ambition, identity, and the malleable nature of personality.
The twisty, fast-paced debut effectively skewers online culture while telling a tense story about a family threatened from within and without.