L.S. Popovich's Blog, page 4

Review of Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

My experience with JCO books is that sometimes she gets into this mode of extreme, frenetic pessimism. Near-continual verbal abuse. Characters spouting off like they have a compulsive speech disorder. Extreme levels of repetition. She continues circling the topics she often reverts to, without moving the plot forward. That is the case here. Thousands of […]

Review of The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (Fairyland, #4) by Catherynne M. Valente

Gorgeous beyond belief. Her diction and vocabulary rarely misstep. She ensorcells with glittering scoops of wordplay piled high. It’s a rodeo show of intriguing imagery starring absurdly well-read children.We start out with the changeling scenario. A troll boy’s feeble attempt to pass as a human child. When he meets a similar classmate, we are launched […]

Review of Review of Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin

Hard living. Child rearing. Drug use. Wild desert landscapes. New Mexico, Paris, Mexico. Small town dramas, rocky relationships. Kids playing in dangerous locales. “Hillbillies.” “Gaunt” people. A young girl’s coming of age. Violent men. The tyranny of life without money. With her signature gorgeous prose, Berlin’s stories remain gloriously readable. In the same mode as […]

Review of 2024 on Goodreads by Various

This year I gave away around 200 books but bought around the same number.  My room overflows with cheap paperbacks. The public library was helpful, though they have been removing an alarming number of audiobooks from Hoopla, Libby, and Boundless. Still, when I walk in, they get my holds out for me like I’m royalty. […]

Review of The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai

Dazai stays in character with this autobiographical short novel about a sad author attempting to reconnect with his lost youth by hanging out with (or harassing) schoolboys. By sharing in their game, he attempts to recapture the sense of adventure and perhaps the inspiration he has lost in his dissolute middle age. The main character […]

Review of Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata

Strange and unsettling lightly speculative fiction from a provocative author. Like with her previously Englished novels and story collections, Murata returns with a surprising novel of pointed social commentary. Though this one was too heavy-handed for my taste, it included enough nuance to captivate me most of the way through. I could have done without […]

Review of American Gothic Tales (William Abrahams) by Various

A recommendable collection full of some stories I’ve read before and some unusual choices. Plenty of classics like “The Veldt,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “A Rose for Emily. But I preferred my encounters with the less-commonly anthologized ones like “Death in the Woods” by Sherwood Anderson, “The Man of Adamant” by Hawthorne, […]

Review of Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

A great, sleazy Japanese novel in the tradition of Ryu Murakami and Shuichi Yoshida.  I would love to read all of her books. I read and loved her two previous short story collections. So far, her most interesting book in English is Terminal Boredom. She broke from traditional Japanese realism here, depicting a gritty auto-fiction […]

Review of Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates

A more succinct example of Dark Academia than The Secret History, and in my opinion, better. Better yet, it can be read in one sitting.  The only criteria I require a book to fulfill to earn a five-star rating from me is that I can’t stop reading. And this book certainly fulfils that requirement. While […]

Review of The Universe as Performance Art by Colby Smith

A collection of eccentric tales. The author has also released a novella and a nonfiction book. With this publication, he gathers a few pieces previously published in Neo-Decadent Anthologies, along with 14 previously unpublished stories. I think the best of the lot is “Hellenic Dropout.” This is probably not the best place to start if […]