Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 Emma Bovary and I have met before, but we were not long acquainted. I started to read Flaubert's novel in between high school and university, but I never finished it. Not even close, actually. When we last moved house, I
Yiyun Li's "The Science of Flight" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 August 30, 2010 issue Yiyun Li's The Vagrants was one of my favourite novels of 2009. Simply tremendous. And I had to give myself a stern talking-to before embarking on "The Science of Flight" because I knew
Téa Obreht "Blue Water Djinn" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 August 2, 2010 issue We learn in the first paragraph that "Blue Water Djinn" is set in Egypt and a quick online search reveals beautiful images of Ras Um Sid (most of which are sneakily connected to advertisements for
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections Harper, 2001 They splotch the busy reader's bookshelf: those oversized contemporary novels that you haven't read yet. You expect Dickens and Trollope and Tolstoy to span the reading weeks, but you expect contemporary novels to be more portable, more succinct, more zip-through-able. It makes it harder
Banana Yoshimoto's Hardboiled and Hard Luck (1999) Trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (2005) This is the last of Banana Yoshimoto's works that have been translated into English that I had to read; if it had been the first of her works that I'd read, I don't think I'd
