Category: Art

I read fewer books in 2017 than I have in years, and wrote a lot less on this blog than in the past. There are (uninteresting) reasons. There were lots of books and films that I wish I’d written about—maybe I’ll squeeze them into a post in the next week—but for now, mostly as a means of archiving and organizing (and a reminder to update the reviews page), these are the longer things I wrote on this blog this year (and, uh, some roosters):

A review of Ishmael Reed’s Christmas satire, The Terrible Twos

RIP William H. Gass

Not a review of Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language

Eddie Campbell’s canon of great graphic novels, 1977-2001

A review of Blade Runner 2049

On Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death

Hurricane Irma reading riff

A review of Gisèle Prassinos’s collection of surreal anti-fables, The Arthritic Grasshopper

A riff on rereading Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

This is not a review of Shattering the Muses, a strange hybrid “novel” by Rainer J. Hanshe and Federico Gori

Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons condenses myth into vibrant narco noir

Lost in The Vorrh

“Translation is an act of risk” | An interview with Rainer J. Hanshe on translating Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare

Not a review of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian

On Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a story about storytelling

A quick note on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of a Dog

Let me recommend Antonio di Benedetto’s overlooked novel Zama

At any moment they could could swell and become something other than what they were | A riff on Paul Bowles

Helen DeWitt’s novel Lightning Rods just wasn’t for me

A review of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed’s syncretic Neo-HooDoo revenge Western

A review of Robert Coover’s excellent new novel Huck Out West