L.S. Popovich's Blog, page 17

Review of Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo

I have read 16 Delillo novels so far.  His literary cobbling definitely intrigues me. The sense of place, the weird characters saying off-the-wall things. The long, unnecessary, wandering, plotless sections of simply intriguing writing. My ranking of Delillo so far: 1. Underworld2. Americana3. Cosmopolis4. The Angel Esmeralda5. The Body Artist6. White Noise7. Mao II8. The […]

Review of Palm Mall: A Vaporwave Novelby Oliver Neale

I have been searching for a ‘real’ Vaporwave novel.  My Vaporwave shelf contains some works which analyze the genre and some books that taunted me with similar aesthetics, like Ballard’s retro futuristic descents into madness and Philip K. Dick’s vibrant dystopias. I came upon this 728-page Vaporwave novel with hesitation. The author has thousands of […]

Review of A Cool Million by Nathanael West

Greasy satire of the most malicious kind.  A rags to rags story about one man’s valiant pursuit of the American nightmare. A surprisingly smooth and cinematic journey through the underbelly of America, which is not an underbelly so much as a carcass here, teeming with greedy maggots. The swindles are clever and the racism is […]

Review of Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

I needed this. More unrestrained than Kawabata. Less brutal than Mo Yan. The voice is folkloric, the storytelling all over the place but always entertaining. With beautiful language, Gao depicts a China in transition, whose government and people are full of contradictions, but also resonant with long-standing traditions, suffused with the aura of millennia. It […]

Review of Later Stories by Alexander Theroux

Not short stories but novellas. While I disliked the tone of most of the stories, and much of the subject matter, I enjoyed the dollops of sophisticated prose. The companion volume, called Early Stories, is half as long and less bloated. it is a better distillation of Theroux’s capabilities and eccentricities. These features of his […]

Review of Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini

A certain type of reader may find the book interesting. Though, it is more of a pamphlet than a book, being 35 pages, with notes and an introduction. The reader would be completely at sea without a lifeboat if it weren’t for the notes, but they constitute a translation of a translation. The translator has […]

Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuelsby Justin Isis

The Weird Tale, as a genre, plays host to stories of far more diversity than most other genres. It can combine elements of horror, literary fiction, historical fiction, humor, adventure, science fiction, and fantasy. Examples abound of Lovecraftian experiments in cosmic dread and Machen-esque descents into sub-realities, but no author better epitomizes the trend than […]

Review of The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Dreams are more interesting in the midst of the fugue. Waking spoils the coherence. Analysis takes some of the fun out of them, even if it nails a few symbols. More intriguing to me are Joseph Campbell’s sort of cultural consciousness archetypes. I feel like there is a lot more here than I wanted to […]

Review of We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light by Julio Cortázar

Cortázar had the face of a lion and the ability to defamiliarize the everyday.  His lengthy paragraphs are more entertaining than Henry James’ because more happens, but the subtle connections between his warring ideas are often obscured by leaps in logic, incongruous character behaviors, and piquant observations. Cortázar doesn’t hold the reader’s trembling hand. To […]

Review of The Anthologist (The Paul Chowder Chronicles #1) by Nicholson Baker

Baker’s deep dive into poetry analysis and history succeeds on every level except for his audiobook narration, which is uneven, ranging from blasting your ear drums out to indecipherable murmurs. The whole book is a poetic interlude about an anthologist failing to write a poetry book introduction. The minutia of his life is cast under […]