Music in Haruki Murakami’s ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’
In Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, music’s presence and absence are central to the concrete and metaphysical spaces the characters migrate between.
literary fiction
Lindsey Drager’s ‘The Avian Hourglass’ Is Wonderfully Weird
While navigating many odd circumstances, Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass provides a continuous stream of consciousness; scientific, literary, and philosophical.
‘Pedro Páramo’ Is a Masterpiece that Resurrects and Welcomes the Dead
In our world, we irrevocably control the dead and their narrative. In Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece Pedro Páramo, however, the dead control their narrative.
Faulkner Bares His Fangs: Vampirism in ‘Sanctuary’
William Faulkner’s unproduced film script, ‘Dreadful Hollow’, was not his only foray into the fantastical, as 1931’s Sanctuary tells its twisted form of vampirism.
‘Calling for a Blanket Dance’ Sews Together a Story of Single Fatherhood
Calling for a Blanket Dance stitches an intergenerational quilt of rich themes: gift-giving, second chances, reclaiming culture, family loyalty, and the indelible search for a home.
Trigger Warning: Fuminori Nakamura’s ‘The Gun’
Fuminori Nakamura’s neo-noir The Gun picks apart the mental machinery of a potential shooter and puts him back together, piece by piece, to identify the fatal components.
‘Bliss Montage Is a Surrealistic Meditation on the Human Condition
Ling Ma’s short story collection, Bliss Montage, brilliantly explores the absurdity and alienation of living under late-stage capitalism.
Dare You Enter Jennifer Egan’s Mind Palace ‘The Candy House’?
Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is an EDM concert, a prestige drama, a mind palace – and a warning.
Debut Novel ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ Brims with Menace
Ariel Delgado Dixon’s compulsively readable debut novel, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, explores what it means to cope with a shared, painful past.
Will the Film Capture the Artfulness of ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’?
With its film adaptation releasing this summer, the best-seller Where the Crawdads Sing calls a reader to open themselves to places and people on the edge.
Marcial Gala’s ‘Call Me Cassandra’ Revolts Against Gender Constraints
In Call Me Cassandra, Marcial Gala dismantles the suffocating binary of unyielding machismo in pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.
Missouri Williams’ ‘The Doloriad’ Pulls Itself Along the Ground
Missouri Williams’ ‘The Doloriad’ is a perverse tale of human remnants scratching out a bare survival like a lone pine twisting out of a stony cliff.