Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

What a powerful collection of stories. I'm only halfway through, but I already feel like I'm in the midst of a master. There's an initial banality to the events in each story but then the narrative gradually reveals a darker, richer and more nuanced reality. Yet, the reality Alarcón ultimately leaves us with is fractured and dreamlike.

What a powerful collection of stories. I'm only halfway through, but I already feel like I'm in the midst of a master. There's an initial banality to the events in each story but then the narrative gradually reveals a darker, richer and more nuanced reality. Yet, the reality Alarcón ultimately leaves us with is fractured and dreamlike.

A quiet and moving account of the early residents of one of the islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. A hard life recounted with beautiful detail. Enjoying Boyle's prose very much.

"Whenever we fought, our mother reminded us that one day they's be dead and it would just be the two of us. It made me wish they'd had more children."

I will be pithy. My god. What a powerful, powerful book. Grief given shape and nuance and beauty. Absence wooed and felt so deeply.

Stunning electron microscope photography of the precious bee.

Splendid reading.

'There, under an acacia tree, in a magic mortar, the Hare pounds the drugs that go into the elixir of life."

"there are nine swallows string in figure eights..."

Thoroughly engaging story told from two perspectives. I'm drunk on the nuances of language in this gentle comic novel. A little heartbroken, too, for its twin protagonists.

Oh, I am so enjoying this. Perfect late year reading.

Astonishing. Still an epic, prescient book. I rode that line the Joads ride to California, from Sallisaw, OK to Bakersfield, CA, all the while rereading this masterwork, and I felt the fiction transformed into fact. Hyperbole turned to history. Literature became literal. I saw many Tim Joads along the way, many Mas, many Rose of Sharons, in the eyes of people I met on this Steinbeck hajj.