The Man without Qualities: Book Review
It’s unfinished. Whatever you read about it, you’ll learn that much. Musil himself reportedly suggested that the work was not so much a novel as an essay that grew past its boundaries — boundaries...
Category: fiction
Book Review: Amos Morris-Reich, “Nazi Fantasy”: Vilém Flusser and History as Site of Experiment
The Czech writer Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) is slowly becoming better known among English-speakers, emerging from a constricting isolation as a “theorist of new media,” particularly in Germany in the 1990s, into more diverse exchanges...
The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story. Book Review
I finished reading a few days ago, and can still feel my admiration building. In many ways traditional in structure, it is a tale of a character transformation, from the point a young man...
Reading Genesis: book review
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, London: Virago, 2024. Can the writer of this very closely-argued, scholarly study be the same Marilynne Robinson we’ve some to know and, at least in my own case, to profoundly...
Book Review: Black Elk Speaks
Rating books is always reductive, unfair: it flattens a full-fledged, 3D experience into a less than a line…just 5 dots! Rating this one is particularly absurd, like passing judgement on the New Testament or...
Riddley Walker (book review)
This book is hard to read. The language insists on calling attention to itself, so no stars for “ease” or “comfort”. But I can’t imagine a more effective way of insisting on the fragility,...