A friend told me about Cloverfield Press a while back — short fiction paired with art and letterpress-printed covers. Since I missed this Murakami story in The New Yorker (it's only online in a terrible, abbreviated version) and never finished Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, I hadn't read this one before. It's a lovely piece on loss, and this little volume is a great way to read it.
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I have to preface this by saying that I haven't actually read this whole book yet, but rather listened to some excerpts. I will appreciate the irony (noted by Gomez) that I will be reading a book about how reading paper books is dead when the time comes, but I wanted to put down some thoughts before I lost them.
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This is probably my favorite short story collection that I've read all year. I find the collections I enjoy the most are those where all of the stories are rooted in certain commonalities while each one retains a distinctive feel and focus, as if the collection constitutes an exercise in working out all the possibilities of those few specific themes.
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This is kind of the academic version of Sex and the City, and I kept finding myself using the words "it's kind of a 'chick lit' novel" in describing it. But it's more than just a quirky novel about dating.
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I came across a mention of this book after I finished Cruddy, more specifically a mention of the story about Barry's relationship with Ira Glass entitled "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend." The hilarity potential was irresistible.
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There's something strangely straightforward and matter-of-fact about this story of a girl who grows up on an island in Maine and then takes an internship in New York where she experiences her "sexual awakening" (as a back-cover quote describes it). In many books there are moments that feel vaguely out of context for either the character or the progression of the storyline, but this book seems to be a string of such events.
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In my attempts to make full use of the library, I often forget to hunt out the nice art books I'd buy if I had that much money to throw around and the strength to haul the hefty tomes around every time I move house. Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the photographer I am most likely to browse.
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I didn't expect this book to be quite as violent as it is. Yet somehow the teenage heroine's strange sense of humor and the dark, smudgy illustrations make it seem like no big deal. This is one of those stories that progresses in the present while skipping back to the past, maintaining two plot lines that come together near the end seamlessly.
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I first came across Kilgallen's work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, though I didn't note her name at the time. It was a somewhat unexciting show, and the Village Voice referred to her piece as "a rare high point." It wasn't until a year or so later than her name came up again and I put them together.
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Eleanor mentioned this and it sounded interesting. Much like she said, the characters were really great but the ending was lackluster. The story takes place in the town Kalimpong during the Indian-Nepali insurgency in the late 1980s with a lot of post-colonial, first-world/third-world themes. Overall the meshing of history and fiction is rather seamless.
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