Two Novels that Strike Close to Home: On Finding Oneself in a Book
Geoffrey Dutton looks at the "book-within-a-book" literary device, as used in the 2015 novel Disclaimer— and his upcoming novel Her Own Devices.
Fiction
48 posts
Fiction of the imagination to experience and remember.
The Philosophy of Marvin Goodspeed
The Regular, the new novel by Dave Buckhout, is a philosophical novel, and its main protagonist, Marvin Goodspeed, is a philosopher. That said, what is the philosophy of this modern day southern Cynic? And what, ultimately, is the book’s (and Buckhout’s) take on him?
The Serpent Papers
The Serpent Papers is about the completion of Joseph Bell’s soul. This battle is fought within and without, and the outcome determines whether his soul lives or dies.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
To praise Jesmyn Ward’s award-winning lyrical novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is to share how it makes the reader feel, how it evokes deep emotions, how it compels us to question…
The Great Alone
Rarely has the setting played as important a role in a novel as Alaska does in The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah. It becomes a towering character throughout the novel,…
Defying Death with Words: On Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End
Where would reasons end? The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño once said in an interview: “I don’t think reason has anything to do with parent-children relationships, not at all. Perhaps from the perspective of a child, reason does impose itself, but from the perspective of a parent, it’s very difficult to impose reason.” Is parenthood a precursor to the end of reason?
Rico Stays
Rico Stays is the final novel in Ed Duncan’s Pigeon-Blood Red trilogy. As he did in the other two books in the series, Pigeon-Blood Red and The Last Straw, Duncan…
The Devil’s In The Details
Published by Atmosphere Press in 2019, The Devil’s In The Details is San Diego based writer and artist V.A. Christie’s debut fiction collection available in both paperback and e-book formats. The Devil’s…
Hip Set
Michael Fertik’s novel Hip Set is not only a thrilling detective story but also a literary inquiry into the sacred and the profane—the secular sandwiched between both. When it comes to human behavior, there is nothing pure about it, just as there is nothing pure about what lies on an arc between good and bad or between heaven and hell.
To The Lighthouse
Ever wondered how a novel would read were it written, without restraint, with the freedom and ferocity of a poem? Read Virginia Woolf's masterpiece.