In a 2024 interview with CBS, Percival Everett stated that he once owned a pet crow named Jim that sat on his shoulder while he wrote his 2001 novel Erasure. If that strikes you as an annoying attempt to seem whimsically subversive, congratulations—you haven’t fallen victim to the literary world’s new trend of praising everything... Continue Reading →
Although initially exhibiting some of the charm one would expect from such a highly praised novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress quickly overstays its welcome and becomes tedious in ways that similarly envisioned novels, such as Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, are not. How it reached its status as a "must-read" philosophical novel is beyond me; I'm more inclined... Continue Reading →
First edition paperback (2022) Ashton Politanoff’s You’ll Like It Here (2022) makes for perfect light reading. Comprised of newspaper excerpts, recipes, and advertisements from the early twentieth century, each of its brief 224 pages contains a self-contained “story,” for lack of a better word, about life in Redondo Beach, California, from which its borrowings originate.... Continue Reading →
First edition paperback (2022) The fact that Dashiel Carrera’s debut novel, The Deer (2022), was published by Dalkey Archive Press, a literary giant who has been at the forefront of postmodern and experimental fiction’s rise in popularity and esteem, is nothing to ignore. Boasting a large catalog of works by such eminent authors as John... Continue Reading →
First edition hardcover (2013) Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013) -- while perhaps less overtly erudite and headache-inducing than his previous masterworks -- offers an eveloping, conspiracy-fueled view of the days before and after September 11th, 2001 in New York City. Like most readers, I approached Bleeding Edge as Pynchon-lite, which can be forgiven if one... Continue Reading →
Valperga Literature Review 