It takes strength of character to pursue, and create, human wretchedness in all its shapes for 360 pages. Like many unreliable narrators before him, Norman K ranges from obnoxious to villainous in his pretension, and The Diary of Norman K shows how uniquely we puts on airs, down to a style of speech best described by his “friend” Russell as “an Elizabethan aristocrat who had just woken up from a two-hundred-year coma.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
Dimitrios Ikonomou reads from and chats about The Diary of Norman K
Author and scultor Dimitrios Ikonomou reads from his new novel The Diary of Norman K, and chats with Justin Goodman about his book and its origins, his characters, on having an unreliable narrator on an unreliable journey, on meta-fiction, on…
A review of The Bricks that Build the Houses by Kate Tempest
Beneath the fun, fast, and well-plotted story, is a deep poetic exploration of yearning, creativity, and the constrictions of poverty. The characters live between pulses of transcendence that take place as they struggle to create meaning from their hand-to-mouth lives.
A review of He Runs the Moon by Wendy Brandmark
Themes of identity and belonging disturb the calm surface of Wendy Brandmark’s collection of short stories, which are set in Denver, New York and Boston in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Many of the stories concern characters who have been displaced geographically and emotionally: young or old, successful or unsuccessful, their lives have slipped their moorings.
A review of Re-Enchanting Nature by David Vigoda
Readers who look for a novel well steeped in philosophy which takes the classic love scenario and turns it upside down will find much to relish in this evocative story of adventurers who seek to reinvent not just themselves and each other, but their worlds.
A review of Diaboliad & Notes on a Cuff by Mikhail Bulgakov
These two handsome and distinctive paperbacks form part of a series showcasing the work of Russian Master Mikhail Bulgakov. Some of the stories in Notes on a Cuff appear in English for the first time, so this is a real treat for Bulgakovians. In addition, both books include valuable textual apparatus: photographs (Mikhail was quite the dandy), notes and a concluding section on the life and work of Bulgakov.
A review of The Fugue by Gint Aras
The Fugue is thus a novel of paradoxes. Inspired by a notion of the harmonious and contrapuntal progression of musical voices through time, it is equally a story about being stuck in someone else’s nightmare. An epic saga of family lives and losses, it is also a chamber piece with surprisingly few characters. Located squarely in Cicero, its moral implications ripple outwards to cover the entire world. I could not help remembering that faire fugue, in French, means to run away.
Rebecca Starford on Bad Behaviour
In this special Newcastle Writers Festival episode, Rebecca Starford, the author of Bad Behaviour, reads from and talks about her memoir and how it came about, her “characters” and why she needed to revisit them, about the complex and fuzzy…
A review of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Watchman is a coming-of-age story about 26-year-old Jean Louise who is racially tolerant and non-apologetic towards Maycomb’s prevalent bigotry. Upon discovering that her closest friends and family have adopted the very social standards that Atticus fought against in Mockingbird, Jean Louise must find her own moral code and identity. “Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
Mark Flanagan on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Infinite Winter
Mark Flanagan is the founder and editor of Run Spot Run, and the instigator behind Infinite Winter, an online book club of hundreds of readers who have banded together to jointly read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in celebration of the…