Liz read and liked Greg's review of The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann:

"There are things in the world that just suck and there is nothing you can do about them. I'm not talking about 'important' things like awful governments and assholes ruining the world or any of that kind of stuff, but rather things that should exist...more There are things in the world that just suck and there is nothing you can do about them. I'm not talking about 'important' things like awful governments and assholes ruining the world or any of that kind of stuff, but rather things that should exist but never will. For example some of mine are that there will never be a completed third novel by David Foster Wallace (although I can keep my fingers crossed that someday the full version of Infinite Jest will be published, but I won't be holding my breath for it), or that Leonard Cohen and Nico never recorded an album together, or my newest one that Ingeborg Bachmann never finished writing the five novels that were to make up her Death series.

In this book are two of the novels that would have been part of her series of novels that would have been some seriously great shit if they had ever been written. From what I know about her these are about the only fragments of the Death novels that were actually written, or at least written enough to be publishable, or maybe it's just in translation, but I do know she never finished them. I don't think either of these two novella length pieces are probably finished either, they stand up fine on their own but they still seem like they only the beginnings of what she is trying to achieve.

The stories that make up these two novella length things are about ways of dying. Not the usual ways that people die though, or more specifically that one person kills another another, but in the subtle ways that people kill one another in their interactions with one another. The unfolding of the deaths in these two pieces comes across as almost more horrific than if someone had just walked up to someone and shot them in the head, and nothing so awful happens like this to the main characters here (well maybe not) but it's the little stupid everyday things that people do to one another that is put under a harsh light to show the effects they have on others. It's almost like she has taken the catch phrase "Banality of Evil" and given it a new treatment and yelled j'accuse! at everyone.

These two stories are also wonderfully interconnected, with cross references to each other, and a mixing of what is the 'fact' in the stories and fictions within fictions, and according to the notes in the book there are also interconnections made between what would have been the other books she had planned. I'm kind of a sucker for these kinds of loose connections between novels, so it's just another reason why I feel like the world would be a little bit better off if she had been able to finish writing her books, or at least learned the important lesson of don't fall asleep with a lit cigarette. (less) "

Liz read and liked Christophernies's review of The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

"Mindless crap that validates everyone who described themselves as "misunderstood" in high school. Mary-Sued to all hell, a onanistic and incomprehensible exploration of the tragic state of the "shy kid."

Idiocy. "