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The Windup Bird Chronicle
When I was a boy, I’d lie on my back on the summer grass and watch the massive clouds form and reform, slow and silent, and I’d try to grasp the story I imagined they were telling me. I’d watch the...
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Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman
Years before the Beatles came into view,, a grand Irishman named Flann O’Brien (O’Nolan, in other contexts) gave us a magical mystery tour of his own. The Third Policeman is a tale told us by an...
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Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen
The atmosphere is thick and heavy in this dense Florida, the story is tangled as if it were an ancient root ball of histories and relationships, and there is another, weightier element here: the...
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Arguably by Christopher Hitchens
I’ll propose a little exercise: Each time you pick up a book by some notable author, Google <that author>+Christopher Hitchens. I bet you will find more than a little delight in the essay, book...
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Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
In the last book I wrote about here, Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Hitchens claimed that science fiction was not of great interest to him. It must have seemed to him that the realm of real...
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Rounding the Mark by Andrea Camilleri
Resuming my investigation of great detectives of the world, I’m back in Italy. Inspector Montalbano is ponderous–sluggish, even–and, as is demonstrated in the work of other stars of the Italian...
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The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell
I am drawn to Kurt Wallender and feel a sympathy for the cop and his “need to understand” the underpinnings of whatever unnatural death comes under his investigation. Wallender is exhausted...
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Ian Rankin’s “Tooth and Nail”
Inspector John Rebus is a bad boy. Rough-edged and scruffy, he breaks the rules and rides roughshod over the London proprieties as he takes on a helping role in solving their particularly ugly...
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The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark
If Charles Dickens had somehow taken a bad acid trip, he may have brought forth a work of this luminous, nightmarish misery and populated it with villainous characters of this kind of relentless...
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The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
Just when I thought I was through with monsters for a while– after finishing The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark–I encountered this terrific story by W. Somerset Maugham. There is, he is saying,...
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