Archive for the ‘Unique Narrative’ Category

HOUSE OF HOLES: A BOOK OF RAUNCH by Nicholson Baker

…Baker chose a small concept idea for his latest, House of Holes, a cheeky plunge into lust and vulgarity so steep and rank, so exhaustive and consummate, that it is recommended to be read in small doses. That’s easy, as each surreal chapter is its own short carnal experience…

August 9, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Award Winning Author, Humorous, Unique Narrative

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP by S. J. Watson

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is a debut novel from British author S.J. Watson, and the book has already made considerable waves in the world of publishing. This is due in part to the fact that film director Ridley Scott bought the movie rights. There’s a big question behind the media blitz: is all the hype justified?

August 4, 2011 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Identity, Mystery/Suspense, Thriller/Spy/Caper, Unique Narrative

AND YET THEY WERE HAPPY by Helen Phillips

Like a fairy tale, way (way) back in the day when you could still be enchanted, and yet they were happy makes you feel giddy and haunted at the same time. I found myself blinking a lot while reading, as if I couldn’t quite believe what my mind was seeing. Slowly, I realized: I believe.

August 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Award Winning Author, Experimental Fiction, Short Stories, Unique Narrative

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVANTO by Maile Chapman

Nestled in the pristine Finnish woods is a sanatorium for women. It’s the 1920s and medicine and its accompanying attitudes towards women’s health is moving from Victorian ideas to more modern methods of treatment, but those shifts have not yet reached the women’s hospital at Suvanto. This vast multistoried building is still part spa for the wealthy wives of the male employees for the local timber company, and part hospital for the poor. This is a building with sharp physical and mental divisions between staff and patients and also between the patients themselves. The poor patients–those who are considered “really” ill are kept on the bottom floors, while the convalescing wives of the timber employees, called the “up-patients” lodge on the 5th floor.

July 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Finland, Gothic, Mental Health, Mystery/Suspense, Unique Narrative

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND by Michel Houellebecq

It’s often said that a critic has no place christening contemporary works as literature; it’s for future generations to decide which books will live on and which will fall the way of obscurity. According to this line of thinking, 19th- century Russians were just as incapable of heralding their literary giants as the ancient Greeks were of immortalizing Homer or the Elizabethans, Shakespeare. But there’s something in this argument I’ve always found hard to believe: great literature lives on not because it’s incidentally suited to future tastes or historically informative; it lives on because it captures some of that elusive essence of what it is to be human, and while that universal quality all literature possesses is hard to pin down, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it. Tolstoy’s contemporaries knew what they held in their hands with WAR AND PEACE just as I knew what I held in mine the first time I picked up a book by Jose Saramago. So let me be clear: Michel Houellebecq is such a writer and THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND is a book that will be read for generations to come.

July 2, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Translated, Unique Narrative, World Literature

CENTURIES OF JUNE by Keith Donohue

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue is a modern fable revolving around American myths and Hindu concepts of reincarnation. The protagonist is a man who awakens to find himself with a hole in the back of his head and no idea of who he is or who the eight nude women sleeping in his bed might be. An elderly figure who he believes is the ghost of Samuel Beckett helps him into the bathroom and then saves his life from each woman as they attack him in historical order of when they were wronged by him in his past lives.

May 31, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Life Choices, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Unique Narrative