Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Books written by American authors. Usually written in English.
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Wharton explores eerie presences and does so with a flare that lingers in the air over your shoulder as you read. Her prose is elegant and languid, drawing the reader in with lush descriptions and then twisting each tale to a disturbing and artful ending.
When I purchased Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the clerk at our local independent bookstore clued me in to the presence it has in the horror reading community. And, oh, what a presence it is.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is a classic and compelling play centering around one poor Black family struggling to get ahead in 1950s Chicago.
What Kushner excels at is creating a sense of endings and of a grief that hangs above each of the characters as they accept illness, accept death, and accept that change is coming whether they want it to or not.
I’ll leave it up for you to decide whether the novel lives up to its extensive praise. For my part, despite the book being outside my literary comfort zone, I did see what made it so ground-breaking and so influential. It was worth the read — as long as the graphic violence (including sexual violence) is something that you can tolerate as a reader.
Every essay is a painstakingly, achingly beautiful construction of argument. From word choice to phrasing, he has a way of driving to the point, but also doing so with a biting simplicity.
Usually, I would consider White Out too new to review here, but I made an exception because it has that certain something more that makes a book timeless. It looks at a subject in a way that is entirely unique and entirely new.
My summer of reading non-fiction continues with two selections — Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. The two books naturally go together and I’ve decided to review them together here because I feel like they end up completing each other.
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.
While Lowell is perhaps not exactly a well-known name outside of academic and literary circles, Lowell has a lasting influence on modern poets, writers, and scholarship.
