Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Han Kang, _The Vegetarian_, trans. Deborah Smith

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JUST ABOUT ANY Man Booker winner is worth reading, but this one may be a classic. The vegetarian of the title is Heong-hye Kim, a young Ko...
Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Rae Armantrout, _Versed_

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TOOK ME A while to get around to this; it appeared in 2010. To tell the truth, I usually skip Pultizer Prize winners.  They tend to be worth...
Friday, June 23, 2017

Jackie French, _Ophelia, Queen of Denmark_ , and Lisa Klein, _Ophelia_

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PAUL GRIFFITH'S BRILLIANT Let Me Tell You got me thinking about Ophelia as a Young Adult Novel theme, and it turns out that attempts ha...
Thursday, June 22, 2017

Jonathon Sturgeon, "Divine Indigestion"

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YET ANOTHER COINCIDENCE (as in immediately preceding post): I finished Nell Zink's Mislaid on the plane, proceeded to a year-old issue o...
Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Brad Gregory, _The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society_ via Mark Lilla

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I ORDINARILY DO not write an entry on a book until I have finished it, but since it may be years before I finish Gregory's fairly dense ...
Monday, June 19, 2017

Nell Zink, _Mislaid_

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SOMEWHAT TO MY surprise, Zink's second novel is a bit more grounded, "normal," and domesticated than her first; family conflic...
Saturday, June 17, 2017

Mark Lilla, _The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction_

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LILLA IS A particular favorite of mine. The Stillborn God is brilliant intellectual history of the old kind (A. O. Lovejoy, Erich Auerbach, ...