pickTune in to the Tournament of Books tomorrow (themorningnews.org/tob) to see how I decide between an autofictional romp and a novel/poem/play...one thing's certain, someone in the commentariat is going to call me an idiot and say my reading privileges need to be revoked!
It's funny, I was going to compare the energy of Konnar's writing to Karen Russell's. And who's on the back cover blurbing but Karen Russell..."With incantatory magic, [Konar] marches through the most nightmarish of landscapes, swinging her light."
pickRussell's textural imagery and metaphorical gifts are astonishing. And since precise, unique, surprising, beautiful imagery is what I love most, I'm going to put Swamplandia! on the top shelf with the other two dozen of my favorite novels ever.
*I found this to be a very demanding book--seeing all the imagery she called to mind meant slowing down and giving the prose the rapt attention that a visual poet, like Walcott, demands--but I love that!
Ways to Disappear belongs in my favorite corner of contemporary fiction with Heidi Julavits' The Vanishers, Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, Nicole Krauss' History of Love, anything by Jesse Ball, and the first two parts of 2666. So good!
Not the Pulitzer, but Gilead just won my Best Novel written by a Living Person (BNLP) award!
"I was an afterlife for the images I had destroyed."
My runner up for Best book by a living writer
pickAL Kennedy might be the clearest novelist writing today. Looking forward to today's tour of the control room.
pickWell. If we're going to nuke our political future, we may as well make like Major Kong from Dr Strangelove and ride it all the way down, maybe that means binge-reading dystopian lit from now til November. Anyway. This is maybe my favorite cover ever.
If this book didn't exist, I'd try to write it: a close look at the images, both sunken and explicit, in Shakespeare. This is the kind of book I want to keep secret and steal wildly from, which is why I'm posting here, to keep myself honest.
Pithy: "Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids." Wise: "Even with a strong script about such deeply flawed characters, you as an editor have to present them emotionally and intellectually in some fair way...you'd need a real empathy."
