Cover image for Small Comfort by Ia Genberg

Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (Tr. Kira Josefsson): Money, money, money   

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An international bestseller, Ia Genberg’s The Details was one of 2023’s standout reads for me. Published for the first time in English, this year’s International Booker Prize longlisted Small Comfort is an earlier novel, also translated by Kira Joseffson. It has a similar structure, following five characters although this time the link is money rather […]

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Cover image for All That Glitters by Orlando Whitfield

A Snapshot of My Reading #14

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April’s snapshot includes an exposé of jaw-dropping fraud in the art world, a short story collection from a writer whose novels I love and a novel set during the pandemic in a once grand Egyptian hotel about a mischievous octogenarian who meets her match in an eight-year-old boy. The non-fiction book I’m reading is Orlando

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Cover image for Transcription by Ben Lerner

Transcription by Ben Lerner: A characteristically discursive novella

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I reviewed Ben Lerner’s novella 10:04 here over a decade ago, commenting on its many-layered interconnections, impossible to encapsulate in a short post. Since then, I’ve read Leaving the Atocha Station which brought him a great deal of acclaim although, for me, it didn’t match 10.04. Divided into three parts, Transcription is another brief novel

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Six Degrees of Separation – The Correspondent to If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

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Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list,

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