Women Crime Writers
Even the whitest of picket fences can hide a twisting darkness. And that very pressure could itself serve as one of the most complex themes of noir — that of dreams deferred and decisions made with extreme regret.
2015
2015 CE.
2015 is the publication year for the editions below.
You can view all years of edition, or you can search by language/region, genre, era/movement, book authors, or editor/translator.
Eve’s Hollywood
A collection of shorter pieces, and longer prose, all of the writing is connected by Babitz’s love for Southern California’s most famous city and its environs.
Jesus’ Son
Johnson does not pull any punches as he examines the lives of societies various down-and-outs.
Talk
Talk is one of those novels that gives back to the reader according to what the reader puts into it. One can read it on a very surface level, or one can decide to carefully consider the book chapter by chapter and think about what it means in terms of trends of thought and the shifting tides of late 1960s culture.
Fat City
While Tully’s and Munger’s lives intersect time and again and one or the other often tries to connect, they never quite manage to.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
he doesn’t shy away from what happened to her, but neither does she use it to shock the reader. Instead, she writes of the horror with blunt honesty, and brutality tempered with careful sentence level consideration and a language that is powerful, yet never gratuitous.
Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, Shamela, and Joseph Andrews
This November, I want to celebrate that with a month dedicated to essential romance novels from classic literature. Romance is not a genre I often read, but these books have made a profound impact on literature in general, and as such deserve their due consideration and analysis. This is a review of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded and two books best read with it Shamela and Joseph Andrews, both by Henry Fielding.
Cancer Ward
I’ll always remember the hospital and the hospital basement as one of the settings of my childhood. I spent a lot of time there and listening to my mother’s stories of what it’s like to work in healthcare. This is a review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward.
The Case Against Satan
For a few years, starting when I was twelve or thirteen I followed the same ritual on Friday nights. Right after dinner, as dusk was falling, I’d walk to the mall across the street and enter the store, making a beeline to my favourite section — the horror movies. This is a review of Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Something to note about Ligotti: You have to expect to think. Sometimes, when I’m in the mood for a horror story, I’ll pick up a collection and know that I’m reading a good yarn that is just and only that. But Ligotti interweaves an existential dread into his stories and concepts that keep you thinking long after the story ends. This is a review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe.