In their films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun proves that they know what it’s like to grow up as a social outcast in front of a screen—that feeling of isolation among supposed community, of struggling to stand out despite a fear of being perceived. In... Continue Reading →
As a 1232-page “abridgement,”* Tom’s Crossing is as momentous as the Isatch Mountains traversed by its main characters, Kalin March and Landry Gatestone. Beholden to a promise made to the titular Tom Gatestone—Landry’s adopted brother and Kalin’s best friend, who has died of cancer at 17—the pair set off with mare Navidad and gelding Mouse for “Tom’s... Continue Reading →
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 →
Valperga Literature Review 