L.S. Popovich's Blog, page 6

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this publication, he gathers a few pieces previously published in Neo-Decadent Anthologies, along with 14 previously unpublished stories.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 […]

Review of The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt by Damian Murphy

A very readable short novel by one of my favorite living authors.  I feel like when you say ‘living author’ you’re talking about someone about to keel over. But Damian Murphy may put out dozens of more books in his time. At the rate he is going we can look forward to many more descents […]

Review of Catastrophe: And Other Stories by Dino Buzzati

The author depicts the daily travails of individuals encountering bizarre and unexplainable phenomena. The details of the stories accumulate in subtle shifts of tone, always sliding toward uncanny doom. The consequences the hapless heroes face are sometimes uncertain – the tales are often abandoned at the perfect moment, when the destructive incident is about to […]

Review of War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

A nasty brutish and short book.   But rewarding. The perils of war. We follow Ferdinand, a wounded soldier, as he is taken in and variously abused by nurses and doctors. As he inhabits the tenuous zone of the infirmary, striking out periodically to escape an uncertain fate, he is haunted by the memories of his […]

Review of Notes from the Underworld by Vik Shirley

A very short fantastical exploration of the traditional Greco-Roman underworld, full of gods, monsters and characters compiled from popular Greek myths.  It is far to short, with prose poems or paragraphs taking up 1/4 of a page. It would have made a fine short story, but is packaged like a novella. The illustrations help pad […]

Review of The Nun by Denis Diderot

A brutal and brilliant satire, but atypical for its time.  Diderot was jailed for his polemic writings. Rightfully indignant toward religious men of power of the time. His most famous works were published posthumously – the only ones still in print – regarded as classics. He fits snuggly next to Rousseau on the bookshelf, although […]

Review of Tears of a Komsomol Girl by Audrey Szasz

An experimental novel with photographs.  The plot revolves around a young female protagonist rebelling against her harsh upbringing by transgressing in various typical ways. She makes the perfect target of a notorious serial killer. The author spends ample time describing the Brutalist cityscape of the USSR, which is a place she is familiar with. She […]