To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
While it might sound like a difficult read, it isn’t. Guibert’s voice remains strong even as his body is starting to weaken and more fear dominates his days.
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While it might sound like a difficult read, it isn’t. Guibert’s voice remains strong even as his body is starting to weaken and more fear dominates his days.
Penguin Vitae editions are easy to love and to gush over. The colours! The foil text! The hardcover, in a comfortable size!
Wojnarowicz is asking us to listen to him crying from his deathbed and the reader cannot turn away.
Reading Isherwood brings you into a moment in history, and there’s something really powerful and rare about that.
Sometimes books constructed out of vignettes seem to be built on a faulty foundation and have frames that are not enough to withstand the weight of a message or a book. Firestone here has used the flexibility of very short vignettes to construct just what her title implies — an airless space.
I do love a short novel. Not only do they reliably help me out of even the most prolonged of reading slumps, but short novels are where writers really shine. It takes a lot of skill to craft a narrative that is tight but still full of intent and power.
When you read these stories, it’s easy to start looking for threads of his eventual fate or at least the mental state that led to it. Are they there? Yes, but they are subtle.
While the book is called The Lover, I would argue that it’s not much about the lover at all.
This isn’t just a book about a crime nor is it a fictionalization of that crime. Millett spends time with victim and perpetrator and with her own reactions to the case.
If you’ve never read Dorothy Parker, you are in for a real treat with this book. She’s a writer that was known just as much for the sharpness of her wit as for the products of her pen, and she is delightfully funny in that very special, dry, sarcastic way that I always love.