No 399 Lucinella by Lore Segal for #1976Club
My second read for the 1976 Club this week is the wacky and wonderful Lucinella by Lore Segal, which would also make a perfect read for Novellas in November. This slim book is a satire on the New York literary scene which utilises meta-fiction, magic-realism and a sense of dream-like whimsy to great effect. Depicting…
No 403 The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
I’m telling you stories. Trust me. It has been well over twenty years since I read Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit and Sexing the Cherry in quick succession. I’m not sure why I never returned to her writing, but on the strength of The Passion, it seems that I have been missing…
No 430 Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood #readingirelandmonth21
Caroline Blackwood is probably not best known for her writing. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling ‘muse’ courtesy of her high-profile marriages first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell. Born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster, she was presented as a debutante…
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No 431 Foster by Claire Keegan #ReadingIrelandMonth21
It’s Contemporary Literature Week on Reading Ireland Month and Claire Keegan’s Foster certainly falls into that category as it was published by Faber in 2010. However, I could just as easily have included it in next week’s Classic Literature category because that is what Foster will undoubtedly become. A classic. In fairness, Foster could also…
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No 436 Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh
I had initially lined this short historical novel up to read as part of Novellas in November, but didn’t manage to fit it in. I’m a big fan of Christopher Marlowe’s plays and the myth-making that surrounds him as a figure, so was keen to read Louise Welsh’s fictional retelling of the last murky days…
No 459 Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson may be the perfect novella. It may even, for me, be the perfect book. It is epic yet small, and contains the multitudes of life within a little over 100 pages. The economy of language on display is paired with a surfeit of emotion, giving this slim book the heft…
No 461 Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
I am kicking off Contemporary Novellas week with a little known surrealist gem that explores the relationship between a lonely housewife and an amphibious humanoid sea creature named Larry. Yep, you did read that right but please trust me! Mrs. Caliban is, afirst and foremost, a romance. Dorothy is a depressed and trapped housewife whose…
No 471 Horses by Keith Ridgway Book 20 of #20booksofsummer20
Keith Ridgway’s writing gets under my skin. I first encountered his work when I read Hawthorn & Child a surreal, esoteric crime novel like no other crime novel. Even more intriguing was Animals, a novel which charts the mental and physical breakdown of an unnamed narrator as he wanders around his city and becomes terrifyingly…
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No 590 The Hunters by Claire Messud
In Claire Messud’s acclaimed novel The Woman Upstairs, her fascinating character of Nora was held up as a perfect example of an unreliable narrator, to the point where some readers even questioned her sanity. In The Hunters, a collection of two novellas, Messud seems to be dissecting the very idea of what a narrator is.…
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