David Cooper's Blog - Posts Tagged "book-review"
Books: in David Grand's Mount Terminus both protagonist and Los Angeles come of age
"David Grand’s third novel, Mount Terminus, is written in luscious, erudite prose so dense his readers have no choice but to read it slowly."
-- from my review of Mount Terminus by David Grand on New York Journal of Books. Also see my examiner article.
Mount Terminus
Israeli books: Youval Shimoni's experimental post-modern fiction classic A Room
In my New York Journal of Books review of Youval Shimoni's A Room I write: "A Room is strongly recommended to readers of post-modern and experimental fiction who enjoy stream of consciousness narratives and who are willing to delve deeper than a thin plot’s surface level."
See my examiner article for additional excerpts from the novel.
Book review: Dinner at the Center of the Earth
"In the book’s acknowledgements Englander thanks his editor for extracting the text of the novel from a much longer manuscript. The salvage operation feels uneven as a work of literature, but its ideas are worth engaging." -- from my review of Dinner at the Center of the Earth Nathan Englander in New York Journal of Books
Book Review: The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar
"One of the lessons this complicated book conveys is how difficult it is to achieve the golden mean, balancing a serious writer’s need for solitude to reduce distractions with the need to stay connected and involved with one’s family and loved ones on the one hand, and integrating knowledge and appreciation for global culture with an intimate involvement with one’s particular tradition and civilization on the other. If the consequences of failing to achieve those balances are not as dire for most of us as they are for Andrew, nonetheless many of us would benefit from a closer examination and recalibration. Extending the metaphor on a national and international scale to include the 9/11 attack may seem like a stretch, or is it?" -- From my review of The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar in New York Journal of Books
Book Review: Empty Set by Veronica Gerber Bicecci
"Veronica Gerber Bicecci’s debut novel, second book and her first translated into English, Empty Set (Conjunto vacío), has multiple dualities—the verbal and the visual, the analytic and the emotional, autobiography and fiction—that aspire to convey ineffable sums greater than their constituent parts." -- From
my review
of
Empty Set
by Veronica Gerber Bicecci in New York Journal of Books
