Tag: Literature

The Agonies by Ben Faulkner

In all earnestness, the teenaged narrator of this affecting novel desperately needs sports. A sport, any sport: even a sedentary bookworm like myself can recognize that the kid has too much energy and too few healthy outlets. The kid in question is Armie Bernal, the son of two semi-famous writers who divorced when he was …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/07/10/the-agonies-by-ben-faulkner/

In A Deep Blue Hour by Peter Stamm

Translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann. It’s weird: this book smells to high heaven of being very firmly Literary Fiction, one of my least favored genres, yet I really enjoyed it. There were definitely parts where the narrator has a thought process so decidedly masculine that I scoffed at the idea of her …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/06/25/in-a-deep-blue-hour-by-peter-stamm/

Madame Sosostris And The Festival For The Brokenhearted by Ben Okri

Do you believe that books come to you when it’s the right time for them? That doesn’t mean that you’re going to read them and immediately connect: and there’s a lot to be said for coming to books like Catcher In The Rye and the more dire works of Anne McCaffrey as an adult, when …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/06/04/madame-sosostris-and-the-festival-for-the-brokenhearted-by-ben-okri/

Allegro by Ariel Dorfman

Friends and readers, what a glorious thing it is to have music in the world! Whether you appreciate it for itself, or for the ways in which it can bring you closer to divinity — as Johann Sebastian Bach, among so many others, believed — music is a gift that connects the interior world ineffably …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/29/allegro-by-ariel-dorfman/

A Perfect Day To Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama

A Perfect Day To Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama

translated elegantly from the original Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood. Looking back from my grand old age of mumble mumble, I can safely say that the transitory years to adulthood, when you’re no longer a student but expected to be able to mostly fend for yourself and make good decisions are genuinely some of the roughest …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/30/a-perfect-day-to-be-alone-by-nanae-aoyama/

Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud

Winner of the Prix Goncourt, and translated from the original French by Cory Stockwell. There is an unusual form of French novel, of which this is a prime example, called the recit. It’s a sort of self-aware narrative, in which the narrator knows that they’re telling a story, with all the inherent discomfort of self-consciousness. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/24/live-fast-by-brigitte-giraud/

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

For most of my time reading Mrs Dalloway, I wrestled with the eight deadly words: I don’t care what happens to those people. The novel begins with a relatively famous opening line, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It tells stories of numerous people on one day in midsummer London of 1923, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/14/mrs-dalloway-by-virginia-woolf/

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

One of the things that science fiction writers have learned how to do in the 206 years since Frankenstein was first published is how to bring their readers along with the new elements of the world that they put into their stories. Most of the time, they take care to make the fantastic elements plausible …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/28/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-2/

Total Suplex Of The Heart by Joanne Starer & Ornella Greco

About halfway through this slice-of-life graphic novel, I realized that what I was reading felt too deeply personal to be anything less than semi-autobiographical. So when I got to Joanne Starer’s afterword, discussing how this story was based on her own life, I was both unsurprised and deeply moved by the grace and honesty she …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/27/total-suplex-of-the-heart-by-joanne-starer-ornella-greco/

Hit And Run by John Freeman

Hunh. So I don’t know very much about the author, but I get the distinct feeling that I would have appreciated this novella a lot more if I did. Hit And Run begins with the titular violent act, as witnessed by our narrator John Frederick and his friends Louise and Brian. John sticks around to …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/04/17/hit-and-run-by-john-freeman/