September 2009 Archives

Was this book literary or genre fiction? I suppose if one has to ask then it's pretty snobby of me to assume that it matters. But I kept going back and forth between really liking it and thinking it was amazing and being a bit annoyed by the satanic fantasy story.

Like another (completely unrelated) book I read recently, A Good and Happy Child, I find books featuring the seemingly all-powerful devil as an antagonist have a problem: I just don't buy it. I don't mean I can't suspend my disbelief that the devil is a character in the story, I mean I don't believe that a human character has any chance of actually tricking the devil in any way. Unless some other supernatural forces are thrown in, you are pretty much screwed.

I love Loorie Moore. Birds of America and Like Life are two incredible short story collections. Anagrams is clearly an earlier work, and it's a novel (though, really, it's a collection of short stories and one novella, but they call the whole thing a novel) and--while I did enjoy it--it's not as good as those other books.

I have her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, sitting on my nightstand, and I will read it soon.

A book from the independent Ellipsis press. Interesting. Kind of gross.