My Year Of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, is the story of an unnamed recent art history graduate in mid twenties. Place: New York. Time: 2000/2001. Plot: The heroine decides to sleep her life away, or at least a year of it, a feat she tries to achieve DIY-style with a… Keep Reading
Guadalupe Nettel’s murky and haunting memoir, “The Body Where I Was Born”, stays with you long after reading. It lingers like the taste of black coffee on your tongue; a bittersweetness that stains the roof of your mouth. Nettel looks back on her childhood in the form of a kind of soliloquy to her psychoanalyst,… Keep Reading
I’m not sure whether the publishing company Faber and Faber had a specific target group in mind when they put together the promotional material for Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends, in 2017. Though this story is very much about the lives and mindsets of millennials (roughly speaking the generation born between the early… Keep Reading
This month on the Ark Audio Book Club we discussed the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s disturbing 1983 novel of repression desire and violence, The Piano Teacher. The novel tells the story of Erika Kohut, a talented one-time concert pianist in Vienna who, due to a couple of key performance failures (although arguably the cause… Keep Reading
Yesterday someone came into the shop and picked up the book where I had left it open. She liked: the persona confused over a drowned dog. She disliked: the sentence “Air cracks apart like a green fruit.”(124) This is to her too self-satisfied, and asked was this a poem at all, this diary entry of… Keep Reading
If you read I Love Dick in public places and have ever since missed the strange looks from passersby, despair no more; here is another book for you to read on the metro! The Necrophiliac is a very short book from 1972 and many reviews emphasize how disgusting it is and how difficult it was… Keep Reading
Torpor is the final part of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick trilogy, a series which chronicles the final years of her (character’s) marriage to the cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer and her obsession with Dick and her attempts to become a filmmaker, and maybe in the process become a little bit more like her hero, Simone Wiel. Set… Keep Reading
One dimension of these times in which we live, the times of post-truth, is that they are troubled by an epidemic of fake news. The “fake” infuses the public debate of which we are a part of, whether we like it or not. This very specific condition can be, and indeed is, met with a… Keep Reading
While reading this book, my exasperated groaning-rate was higher than usual. The whole thing reads like an ‘about me’ section from the early days of social media, like an all too earnest myspace page. Sheila Heti, the author, has written a story about representation and constructing a self through art. Her namesake protagonist wants to… Keep Reading
Linda Rosenkrantz’s book Talk is a collection of the real-life conversations between Rosenkrantz and her two best friends, which she recorded during the summer of 1965 and transcribed into twenty-eight chapters of carefully selected dialogue. The book contains the universal topics of sex, love, food, self-identity and mental health and reflects the anxieties of a post-pill generation… Keep Reading