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):
Garden with Roosters , 1917 by Gustav Klimt
A review of Ishmael Reed’s Christmas satire, The Terrible Twos
RIP William H. Gass
Th Rooster , 1966 by Ivan Generalic
Not a review of Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language
Eddie Campbell’s canon of great graphic novels, 1977-2001
Sparring Cockerels by Charles Tunnicliffe
A review of Blade Runner 2049
On Philip K. Dick’s novel A Maze of Death
Two Roosters , 1905 by Pablo Picasso
Hurricane Irma reading riff
A review of Gisèle Prassinos’s collection of surreal anti-fables, The Arthritic Grasshopper
Rooster and Hen with Hydrangeas by Ito Jakuchu
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
The Rooster Goes on a Trip by Michael Sowa
Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons condenses myth into vibrant narco noir
Lost in The Vorrh
Rooster and Chicks by Ohara Koson
“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
Rooster , 1900 by Ivan Bilibin
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
Cock on Drum , 1882 by Shibata Zeshin
Let me recommend Antonio di Benedetto’s overlooked novel Zama
The Cock Fighters , 1950 by André Fougeron
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
The Cock Fight, 1882 by Emile Claus
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
Dead Cock , 1660 by Gabriel Metsu