After a Funeral
Diana Athill’s After a Funeral details her experience of being friends with a man who is profoundly destructive both to himself and to everyone around him.
Women Authors
Most old books are written by men. These books were written by women.
Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome is one of the shortest classics you can read. My Penguin Classics edition clocks in at only ninety-nine pages. However, despite the length it is a powerful and sharp narrative full of symbolism, depth, and atmosphere.
The Outcast and the Rite
I’ve gleefully noticed that for the last two or three years there’s been an emphasis on the forgotten women writers of weird fiction. It soothes a sore spot in my child-self.
A Very Easy Death
What constitutes an easy death? Or a difficult one? Though her mother’s death was considered ‘easy’ by doctors, it still involved pain, suffering, and turmoil.
Berg
Quin uses vagaries, the mists of the seaside Brighton, and a circularity of language to construct a perfect circular narrative. So perfect, that it’s a magical experience to get to the ending and read how everything comes together.
Chernobyl Prayer
Chernobyl Prayer is one of the most difficult books that I have ever read. It even took me a year to read it due to stopping and starting and the time I needed to take just to breathe through the amount of raw hurt and fear that she painstakingly documents.
Sweet Days of Discipline
aeggy’s starkness has an edge almost of brutality. She doesn’t mince words, she doesn’t dance around what she is trying to say. A confidence and absolute assurance resonates in her work that I rarely see in other authors.
Good Morning, Midnight
Rhys has achieved this intricate and difficult effect by the sheer force of the language she chooses and how she chooses to use it. The flow of Jansen’s thoughts is relentless — but in a quiet way that, instead of overwhelming the reader, immerses them.
Valentino and Sagittarius
It’s easy to read Ginzburg’s prose in one sitting due to its compelling ebb and flow that makes the pages disappear and story take shape like the very best of books.
The Fifth Child
One things about horror is that it can be a bit loud or garish in the way it delivers the message is seeks to convey. Lessing doesn’t do this.