L.S. Popovich's Blog, page 23

Review of Mimi by Lucy Ellmann

Mimi is not Lucy Ellmann’s best work, but this book was still intelligent and more entertaining than 99% of inanimate objects on this planet. Ellmann’s acerbic brand of feminism doesn’t really work with the goofy male narrator, as other reviewers have pointed out. You most certainly won’t like this plastic surgeon guy, but again, entertainment […]

Review of The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

This book is a prime example of the commercial bent of recent Japanese translations. It is a case study in how to underestimate your readers. It is a case study in how to underestimate your readers. It was well-marketed to adults by a very reputable publisher. Of course it is selling well, garnering misleading blurbs […]

Review of Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

Listened to this whole audiobook on an all-day bike ride. I loved sinking in to the uber-omniscient narration so much that I repeated the experience with his similar book, Starmaker, on a similarly exhausting fifty-mile ride.  This novel is a survey of 1930s European society extrapolated and speculated upon until we arrive at two billion […]

Review of Sleepwalker in a Fog by Tatyana Tolstaya

This second collection by Tolstaya is a brief, inconsequential, but enchanting volume, reminiscent of Cat Valente’s Deathless, or similar quirky, literary, bold tales, congealed together by the old fashioned setting and the unfixed narration.  On the whole, it was not focussed enough to move me, but entertained me all the way through. Extremely naive characters […]

Review of Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1) by Lawrence Durrell

The start, I hope, of a long-term interest in this author. Highly impressed on every level, I am.  At first his style seems forced, but it winds, riverine, recapitulating itself, strengthening as it goes along, so that it is clear, having read much of Henry Miller, that their friendship bled into aesthetic similarities, apart from […]

Review of It Takes Death to Reach a Star by Stu Jones

I received an advanced review copy of the book without knowing anything about the authors beforehand. Immediately, I was not sure about the title. “It Takes Death to Reach a Star” brings to mind a corny line from a sci-fi movie, something a character says right as they press the button to enter hyperspace.A few […]

Review of Reflections of Destiny by Benzon Ray Barbin

One of the first things you’ll notice about this debut novel is the striking imagery. While not always fantastical, it does not shy away from surprising and otherworldly moments.The setting has a baroque atmospheric quality, with many points of reference on which the short scenes tend to hang. It deals with technology, warfare, combat, assassins, […]

Review of The Outlands (The Outlands Saga #1) by Tyler Edwards

I was pleasantly surprised by The Outlands.  The book has movement, action, and fast pacing. The writing rarely slows down, offering a new layer or concept page by page. A labyrinthine world unfolds, depicting the ins and outs of thievery. As orphans in Dios, our main characters are subservient to an abominable caste system, yoked […]

Review of Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon honed his catchy thriller-esque atmosphere into a tense road novel reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s off-kilter weirdness and soft-dystopian Straw Dogs-style manhunts. An addictive read with dark undertones establishing the prescient consequences of social media, drugs, cloning, the morals of biological and artificial relations and other deep and relevant stuff. Yet, the close […]

Review of Waiting for Gaudiya & Other Stories by Erik Martiny

Despite the reference to Beckett in the title of the collection and some passing moments within, this collection of short stories borrows little and invents much. As the opening quote intimates, Martiny invests in a continual creation of reality in real-time, through uncanny conjuring of the absurd, straddling the reader’s comfort zone like a menacing […]