Reviews and riffs of September and October, 2015 (and an unrelated tiger)

The only way I could muster a review of Gordon Lish’s challenging novel (spokening?!) Cess was in a faux-dialog with myself.

I reread Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree in September and considered if Suttree dies at the end.

Then I reread Blood Meridian for the umpteenth time.

I reviewed Penguin Classics bicentennial edition of Jane Austen’s Emma.

I wrote about Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, arguing it was most successful as an evocation of “not knowing.”

Ryan Chang and I continued our discussion of New American Stories, an anthology edited by Ben Marcus. We mostly rapped about stories by Robert Coover and Tao Lin.

I had somehow never read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven before October of 2015.

And, special for Halloween, but really just because I really wanted to reread it, I wrote about one of my favorite ghost tales, Roberto Bolaño’s short story “The Return.”

I also read Autobiography of Red and Red Doc> by Anne Carson during September-October, but erased everything I tried to write on them. I found Autobiography particularly excellent—a real How is this possible? kind of read.

Unrelated tiger by Utagawa Kunisada: