fiction – Page 4 – Mythili G. Rao

Revenge

Head over to Words Without Borders for my review of Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge:

If an enterprising reader were to map the through-lines linking the quiet, twisted (and subtly interconnected) tales of eccentric strangers and mysterious deaths in Yoko Ogawa’s new collection, Revenge, the resulting diagram would likely look something like a spider-web: Delicate, spindled, and perfectly designed for entrapment. The experience of reading Revenge is like getting caught in a beautiful, lethal web—or maybe, like wandering through a labyrinthine haunted mansion. These stories’ charm lies in their treacherous unpredictability. In each tale, it’s impossible to anticipate just what particular nightmarish turn the plot will take, or to guess what shadowy character or tiny detail from an entirely separate tale will reappear (a dead hamster left in a trashcan, a brace designed to make the wearer taller, a three-digit number used in a report). There is a spooky fun-house quality to this collection.

Hot Reads: Middle Men, A Week in Winter, An Armenian Sketchbook, The Teleportation Accident, The Searchers

Featuring a John Wayne western, teleportation experiments, indigestion in Armenia, and the highways of Los Angeles. The full reviews here.

Hot Reads: She Matters, Searching for Zion, The Great Agnostic, Rage is Back, Truth in Advertising

The book that really got to me from this week’s Daily Beast/Newsweek Hot Reads was She Matters. It’s a memoir of an unusual variety. It’s also a real heart-breaker. Every woman has befriended (or been) a Susanna somewhere along the way.

Hot Reads: Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, Try the Morgue, the Middlesteins, A Free Man, The Greatcoat

Let me tell you about this week’s Daily Beast/Newsweek Hot Reads. The Greatcoat was a fine way to spend a rainy afternoon. Several Ways to Die in Mexico City stumbled into my lap and changed the way I think about what I eat and drink. The Middlesteins is the book I happily read in one sitting. Try the Morgue is the book I haven’t been able to stop talking about. A Free Man is the book I wish I’d written that I think everyone should read.

The Planets

My review of The Planets by Sergio Chejfec is up with the latest issue of Words Without Borders:

“A sense of loyalty to his memory leads me to write,” the narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s novel The Planets confesses, thinking back on the life of his dearest friend. Of the duo, M was the story-teller, the writer-to-be, the absent-minded-professor (“always distracted to the point of appearing indifferent”) with a parable in every pocket, viewing the world askance. M was larger-than-life—until he was gone.

Hot Reads, All Fiction Edition: Dare Me, The Thing About Thugs, A Pimp’s Notes, In the Shadow of the Banyan, You & Me

This week’s edition of Hot Reads for The Daily Beast/Newsweek included some real gems, like In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair, Dare Me by Megan Abbott and A Pimp’s Notes by Giorgio Faletti. There’s a sweet new landing page for Hot Reads too.

Hot Reads: Parsifal, Jack 1939, The Red Chamber, The Long Walk, Octopus

I reviewed five hot new releases out July 2nd for The Daily Beast/Newsweek: Parsifal by Jim Krusoe, Jack 1939 by Francine Mathews, The Red Chamber by Pauline Chen, The Long Walk by Brian Castner and Octopus by Guy Lawson.

I Am an Executioner: Love Stories

Dangerous, misunderstood creatures—a man-eating tiger, a wild elephant, and of course, the title executioner, to name just a few—populate Rajesh Parameswaran’s debut collection of short stories. I Am An Executioner offers a fiercely creative—and deeply morbid—vision of what it takes to stay alive. The struggle for survival dominates the lives of these characters; it’s finally their most feral instincts that carve their fates.

I reviewed I Am an Executioner: Love Stories for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. The full review is here.

A Partial History of Lost Causes

For Newsweek/The Daily Beast, I reviewed A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer DuBois:

Jennifer DuBois’s debut novel opens with an epigraph from Vladimir Nabakov: “We are all doomed, but some of us are more doomed than others.” Perhaps an equally appropriate selection for this tender but sharp-edged book would have been the refrain of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” This is a story about learning to face loss and failure—if not with grace or composure, then at least with personal integrity.

The full review is here. (Also, here’s what Gary Shteyngart had to say about this book: “Hilarious and heartbreaking and a triumph of the imagination. Jennifer duBois is too young to be this talented. I wish I were her.”)

Schoolgirl

I reviewed Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl for Words Without Borders.

Written in 1939 but only now translated into English for the first time, Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl—a slim, precocious novella narrated by a schoolgirl of indeterminate age—was stylish and provocative in its time. Almost three-quarters of a century later, its prescience seems eerie; hardly anything about this book seems to have aged, least of all the narrator herself, who is perfectly preserved somewhere along the road to adolescence. Though she’s still young enough to entertain herself with nonsensical songs and inventive daydreams as she walks home from school (“I thought today I will try to pretend that I am from somewhere else, someone who has never been to this country town before”), she’s old enough to know her childhood is fast coming to a close. “It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it,” she reflects.

The full review is here. It’s also definitely worth spending some time with the rest of this month’s Words Without Borders issue (which happens to be all about sex).