Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘novel’

Reviews |

The Love Song of Monkey, by Michael S.A. Graziano

by Anne Stameshkin

After an experimental operation goes mysteriously right, Jonathan finds himself at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, chained to a statue of Venus. He needs no food and breathes water like air. Bonus: He’s immortal. Jonathan’s meditations on love (namely his unfaithful wife, Kitty, who thinks the experiment failed) take him on an adventure to the mid-Atlantic ridge, into a volcanic shaft, and back to land–where he becomes a demon statue, a nimble thief, and even a super-hero.


Interviews |

Interview with Travis Holland, The Archivist’s Story

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

Travis Holland’s first novel, The Archivist’s Story (2007, Dial Press), is set in Stalinist Russia in 1939. The book has been translated into eleven languages and has received numerous accolades, including: a Guardian Readers’ Pick of 2007, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Best Fiction of 2007 choice by Metro.co.uk, a Best Book of 2007 by both the Financial Times and Publisher’s Weekly, and the 2008 VCU Cabell First novelist award. He currently lives in Ann Arbor, where he is at work on his next novel. Jeremiah Chamberlin spoke with him for FWR on December 18, 2008.


Reviews |

Dream City, by Brendan Short

Brendan Short’s debut novel tells the story of Michael Halligan, a nervous child who, in 1930s Chicago, finds solace in the Sunday adventure comics, where pulp heroes like Dick Tracy and the Shadow bring down the bad guys. As Michael grows up, his obsession with the Big Little Books makes human connection difficult, eventually trapping him inside his collectibles shop.


Shop Talk |

Le Clézio's Nobel Lecture: "In the Forest of Paradoxes"

by Anne Stameshkin

In his wonderful Nobel lecture, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues passionately why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society, responding in particular to Stig Dagerman’s Essäer och texter. I greatly admire how this speech–like the best fiction–is at once intimate and inclusive, intensely personal yet widely relevant. Some choice excerpts: If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. The writer, the poet, […]


Interviews |

Interview with Nicholas Delbanco, The Count of Concord

In his most recent novel, The Count of Concord, Nicholas Delbanco revives a largely forgotten but fascinating historical figure who was, in his day, an international celebrity: renaissance man Count Rumford (1753-1814). Brian Short asks Delbanco about the story behind bringing this character back, as it were, to life–and the experience of picking up a manuscript again after 20 years.


Reviews |

The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti

by Charlotte Boulay

In this masterful debut novel, Hannah Tinti beguiles without the slightest trace of the maudlin. Readers will fall in love with Ren, a one-handed orphan boy who works for grave-robbers and longs for a family, and with North Umbrage–a 19th-century New England town where widows press their ears to the earth to listen for their husbands, trapped long ago in a mine collapse.


Reviews |

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, by Xiaolu Guo

by Celeste Ng

In Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the most sharply drawn, most enticing character is contemporary Beijing itself, its “cramped side streets where the walls were like the scales of fish–tall shelves tightly packed with pirated discs.” The city and the promise behind it sparkle in Guo’s descriptions, which are sharp, fresh, and free of clichéd exoticism.




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