Carlos Maria Dominguez’s The House of Paper (2004) Trans. from the Spanish, Nick Caistor Illus. Peter Sis Harcourt, 2005 My first thought when it came to trying to describe this small, slim volume was that it was like Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris mixed with Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude. But that's not
Chris Adrian "The Warm Fuzzies" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 September 27, 2010 issue Why You Might Choose to Not Read this Post: 1. You don't care for short stories; 2. You think The New Yorker is all pretentious-ish-ness; 3. Anything with the word Fuzzies in it can't
Cynthia Flood's The English Stories Biblioasis, 2009 The end of the first story in Cynthia Flood's collection of interconnected stories goes like this: "Sometimes she took off the lid and put her nose right into the box, to inhale." Readers only met Amanda Ellis nine pages ago, so you might think
E.M. Forster's The Longest Journey (1907) When I started reading The Longest Journey, I was reading Keith Oatley's novel, Therefore Choose, which also opens with a scene at Cambridge. He writes: "If one were to go back a hundred years, the clothing would no doubt be different but the young men would
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Birdsong" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 September 20, 2010 issue "She was not merely resting her eyes on the car next to hers, as people often do in Lagos traffic; she was looking at me." It's this look which occasions Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story "Birdsong";
