Mandel's bookshelf: read en-US Tue, 06 May 2025 04:23:51 -0700 60 Mandel's bookshelf: read 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Hav 462196
When Morris published Last Letters from Hav in 1985, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Here it is joined by Hav of the Myrmidons, a sequel that brings the story up-to-date. Twenty-first-century Hav is nearly unrecognizable. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own blinkered view of the past.

Morris’s only novel is dazzlingly sui-generis, part erudite travel memoir, part speculative fiction, part cautionary political tale. It transports the reader to an extraordinary place that never was, but could well be.]]> 301 Jan Morris 0571229832 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.85 2006 Hav
author: Jan Morris
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> City 222093 Librarian's Note: Alternate cover edition available here.

Simak's City is a series of connected stories, a series of legends, myths, and campfire stories told by Dogs about the end of human civilization, centering on the Webster family, who, among their other accomplishments, designed the ships that took Men to the stars and gave Dogs the gift of speech and robots to be their hands.]]> 251 Clifford D. Simak 188296828X Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 4.08 1952 City
author: Clifford D. Simak
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The White Shadow: portrait of the artist as a young rascal]]> 24777239 530 Saneh Sangsuk 2363820452 Mandel 0 3.60 1993 The White Shadow: portrait of the artist as a young rascal
author: Saneh Sangsuk
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, southesr-asian, thai, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> The Sad Part Was 33544543 189 Prabda Yoon 1911284061 Mandel 0 3.64 2000 The Sad Part Was
author: Prabda Yoon
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list, southesr-asian, thai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A scattered world: A Thai novel]]> 21310138

When some men are cursed with immortality,

they endeavour to break the curse

and, if successful, turn into sea animals.




A novel of magical realism and verbal magic

set on the fault line of Islam and Buddhism in Southern Thailand


]]> 87 Siriworn Kaewkan 2363820479 Mandel 0 to-read, southesr-asian, thai 3.33 2008 A scattered world: A Thai novel
author: Siriworn Kaewkan
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, southesr-asian, thai
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat]]> 59397630 330 Veeraporn Nitiprapha 6164510600 Mandel 0 to-read, southesr-asian, thai 3.91 Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat
author: Veeraporn Nitiprapha
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, southesr-asian, thai
review:

]]> Bright 44417241
When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to wait for him in front of some run-down apartment buildings, the confused boy does as told―he waits, and waits, and waits, until he realizes his father isn’t coming back anytime soon. Adopted by the community, Kampol is soon being raised by figures like Chong the shopkeeper, who rents out calls on his telephone and goes into debt while extending his customers endless credit. Kampol also plays with local kids like Noi, whose shirt is so worn that it rips right in half, and the sweet, deceptively cute toddler Penporn.

Dueling flea markets, a search for a ten-baht coin lost in the sands of a beach, pet crickets that get eaten for dinner, bouncy ball fads in school, and loneliness so merciless that it kills a boy’s appetite all combine into Bright, the first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation. Duanwad Pimwana’s urban, and at times gritty, vignettes are balanced with a folk-tale-like feel and a charmingly wry sense of humor. Together, these intensely concentrated, minimalist gems combine into an off-beat, highly satisfying coming-of-age story of a very memorable young boy and the age-old legends, practices, and personalities that raise him.]]> 184 Duanwad Pimwana 1931883807 Mandel 0 to-read, thai 3.99 2003 Bright
author: Duanwad Pimwana
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, thai
review:

]]> The Devils' Dance 39296289
The Devils� Dance � by an author banned in Uzbekistan for twenty-seven years � brings to life the extraordinary culture of 19th century Turkestan, a world of lavish poetry recitals, brutal polo matches, and a cosmopolitan and culturally diverse Islam rarely described in western literature. Hamid Ismailov’s virtuosic prose recreates this multilingual milieu in a digressive, intricately structured novel, dense with allusion, studded with quotes and sayings, and threaded through with modern and classical poetry.

With this poignant, loving resurrection of both a culture and a literary canon brutally suppressed by a dictatorship which continues today, Ismailov demonstrates yet again his masterful marriage of contemporary international fiction and the Central Asian literary traditions, and his deserved position in the pantheon of both.]]> 270 Hamid Ismailov 1911284126 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 3.92 2012 The Devils' Dance
author: Hamid Ismailov
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/04
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> Manaschi 58677103
A radio presenter interprets one of his dreams as an initiation by the world of spirits into the role of a Manaschi, a Kyrgyz bard and shaman who recites and performs the epic poem, Manas, and is revered as someone connected with supernatural forces. Travelling to his native mountainous village, populated by Tajiks and Kyrgyz, and unravelling his personal and national history, our hero Bekesh instead witnesses a full re-enactment of the epic’s wrath.

Following on from the award winning The Devils' Dance and Of Strangers and Bees, this is the third and final book in Ismailov's informal Central Asia trilogy.]]> 257 Hamid Ismailov 1911284576 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 3.73 2021 Manaschi
author: Hamid Ismailov
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Night and Day: A Novel (Central Asian Literatures in Translation)]]> 49879571 292 ʻDz 1644690470 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 4.00 2019 Night and Day: A Novel (Central Asian Literatures in Translation)
author: ʻDz
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> The Understory 63903021 A novel of man's relationship with nature, power, and the vitality of storytelling, from beloved Thai author Saneh Sangsuk.
The lovable, yarnspinning monk Luang Paw Tien, now in his nineties, is the last person in his village to bear witness to the power and plenitude of the jungle before agrarian and then capitalist life took over his community. Nightly, he entertains the children of his village with tales from his younger years: his long pilgrimage to India, his mother’s dreams of a more stable life through agriculture, his proud huntsman father who resisted those dreams, and his love, who led him to pursue those dreams all over again. Sangsuk’s novel is a celebration of the oral tradition of storytelling and, above all else, a testament to the power of stories to entertain.]]> 173 Saneh Sangsuk 1646052757 Mandel 0 4.11 2003 The Understory
author: Saneh Sangsuk
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list, southesr-asian
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth]]> 42462068
The original Thai langaue edition of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the prestigious South East Asian Writers ("S.E.A. Write") Award for fiction and was best-seller in Thailand. It is translated into English by Thai film critic and recipient of France's Chevalier dans I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Kong Rithdee.

Attuned to the addictive rhythms of a Thai soap opera and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window onto the Thai heart.]]> 208 Veeraporn Nitiprapha 6164510139 Mandel 0
Blind Earthworm follows three central characters: Chareeya and Chilika, two sisters reared under the shadow of their parents' broken love and the existential paralysis borne of it; and Pran, the orphan whom they take under their wing as children. Throughout their lives, these three love each other and hurt each with equally fiery intensity, forging the deepest possible connections with one another, but also casting one another into sorrow and alienation time and again. The people around them do likewise with each other. The novel contains many deeply moving stories, giving even its marginal characters fascinating and mythically dramatic story arcs as the narrative jumps back and forth in time. Throughout, Nitiprapha constructs a world in which people lose themselves in the pain of their own traumas and desperately reach out to one another in hope of solace from that pain, only to repeat the same traumas again and again.

At a technical level, Nitiprapha's capacity to craft a dense web of poignant narratives with Borgesian economy is truly impressive. Although the story of Chareeya, Chilika and Pran is the backbone of the novel, it's a genuinely polyvocal work. Often, Nitiprapha compresses an epic story that lesser writers would have mined for an entire novel into a single brief chapter. The stories of Chareeya's and Chilika's parents, of their father's lover Rosarin, of their Uncle Thanit's obsessive search for beauty in the threads of ancient tapestries, of Paradorn's tragic hero-worship of his father Prata, of Nual and her three co-husbands - all of these are instantly iconic and unforgettable.

I can't wait to re-read this lush, dense, beautiful novel, and from here on out anything published by Nitiprapha will be a must read for me.]]> 3.94 2013 The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth
author: Veeraporn Nitiprapha
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/03
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: asian-meetup-list, contemporary, southesr-asian
review:
Nitiprapha's novel deserves to be much more well know than it is. It's a crime that only a few years after its publication, it's somewhat hard to track down a print copy online. I happened upon it searching the internet for works of southeast Asian magical realism, and reading it was a real revelation. The novel is a masterpiece of magical realism that packs incredible riches into its short length. It's suffused with soap-operatic melodrama that wrenches one's heart over and over, and yet never becomes treacly or maudlin. This is partly because Nitiprapha's skillful fabulation heightens the melodrama into the stuff of folklore and myth, but also because the novel is just as much about how abandoning oneself to love in all its forms breeds cruelty, self-deception and suffering as it's about how doing so promises a haven from them.

Blind Earthworm follows three central characters: Chareeya and Chilika, two sisters reared under the shadow of their parents' broken love and the existential paralysis borne of it; and Pran, the orphan whom they take under their wing as children. Throughout their lives, these three love each other and hurt each with equally fiery intensity, forging the deepest possible connections with one another, but also casting one another into sorrow and alienation time and again. The people around them do likewise with each other. The novel contains many deeply moving stories, giving even its marginal characters fascinating and mythically dramatic story arcs as the narrative jumps back and forth in time. Throughout, Nitiprapha constructs a world in which people lose themselves in the pain of their own traumas and desperately reach out to one another in hope of solace from that pain, only to repeat the same traumas again and again.

At a technical level, Nitiprapha's capacity to craft a dense web of poignant narratives with Borgesian economy is truly impressive. Although the story of Chareeya, Chilika and Pran is the backbone of the novel, it's a genuinely polyvocal work. Often, Nitiprapha compresses an epic story that lesser writers would have mined for an entire novel into a single brief chapter. The stories of Chareeya's and Chilika's parents, of their father's lover Rosarin, of their Uncle Thanit's obsessive search for beauty in the threads of ancient tapestries, of Paradorn's tragic hero-worship of his father Prata, of Nual and her three co-husbands - all of these are instantly iconic and unforgettable.

I can't wait to re-read this lush, dense, beautiful novel, and from here on out anything published by Nitiprapha will be a must read for me.
]]> An Archaeology of Holes 201099321 332 Stacy Hardy Mandel 0 currently-reading 5.00 An Archaeology of Holes
author: Stacy Hardy
name: Mandel
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/02
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Limits of Critique 24693146
Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.� She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading�: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible.

By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.]]> 228 Rita Felski 022629403X Mandel 0 criticism, to-read 4.02 2015 The Limits of Critique
author: Rita Felski
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: criticism, to-read
review:

]]> Lucy 333971 164 Jamaica Kincaid 0374527350 Mandel 0 3.81 1990 Lucy
author: Jamaica Kincaid
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read, contemporary, black-american
review:

]]> Whale 29382499 420 Cheon Myeong-Kwan 1628971533 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 3.97 2004 Whale
author: Cheon Myeong-Kwan
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing]]> 1829523
The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.]]> 198 Miranda Fricker 0198237901 Mandel 0 currently-reading, philosophy 4.21 2007 Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
author: Miranda Fricker
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: currently-reading, philosophy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2)]]> 57945861 568 Gene Wolf Mandel 5 4.54 Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2)
author: Gene Wolf
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.54
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: currently-reading, sfnal, contemporary
review:

]]> Confessions of a Mask 62794 Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be “normal.� Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety.

Confessions of a Mask reflects Mishima’s own coming of age in post-war Japan. Its publication in English―praised by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood―propelled the young Yukio Mishima to international fame.]]> 224 Yukio Mishima 0720610311 Mandel 0 4.02 1949 Confessions of a Mask
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves:
review:

]]> A Voyage to Arcturus 1064084 A Voyage to Arcturus has inspired, enchanted, and unsettled readers for decades. It is simultaneously an epic quest across one of the most unusual and brilliantly depicted alien worlds ever conceived, a profoundly moving journey of discovery into the metaphysical heart of the universe, and a shockingly intimate excursion into what makes us human and unique.

After a strange interstellar journey, Maskull, a man from Earth, awakens alone in a desert on the planet Tormance, seared by the suns of the binary star Arcturus. As he journeys northward, guided by a drumbeat, he encounters a world and its inhabitants like no other, where gender is a victory won at dear cost; where landscape and emotion are drawn into an accursed dance; where heroes are killed, reborn, and renamed; and where the cosmological lures of Shaping, who may be God, torment Maskull in his astonishing pilgrimage. At the end of his arduous and increasingly mystical quest waits a dark secret and an unforgettable revelation.

A Voyage to Arcturus was the first novel by writer David Lindsay (1878�1945), and it remains one of the most revered classics of science fiction. This commemorative edition features an introduction by noted scholar and writer of speculative fiction John Clute and a famous essay by Loren Eiseley.]]> 274 David Lindsay 0803280041 Mandel 0 sfnal, to-read 3.57 1920 A Voyage to Arcturus
author: David Lindsay
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1920
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: sfnal, to-read
review:

]]> Pure Colour 57693639 Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374603944 Mandel 0 3.46 2022 Pure Colour
author: Sheila Heti
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: currently-reading, contemporary
review:

]]> Nipponia Nippon 66092885 A fast-paced, darkly ironic novella from one of Japan’s contemporary luminaries (and the husband of Mieko Kawakami), making his English language debut.

Perfect for fans of Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs.

Isolated in his Tokyo apartment, 17-year-old Haruo spends all his time online, researching the plight of the endangered Japanese crested ibis, Nipponia Nippon.

Living on an allowance from his parents, he drops ever further into a fantasy world in which he alone shares a special connection with the last of these noble birds, held at a conservation centre on the island of Sado.

His conclusion is simple: it is his destiny to free the birds from a society that does not appreciate them, by whatever means necessary. With his emotional state becoming ever more erratic, he begins sourcing weapons and preparing for a reckoning in this darkly ironic study of toxic masculinity.]]> 155 Kazushige Abe 1782278532 Mandel 0 to-read, japanese 3.33 2001 Nipponia Nippon
author: Kazushige Abe
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read, japanese
review:

]]> Shadow Ticket 230910361
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974.]]> 384 Thomas Pynchon 1594206104 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 5.00 2025 Shadow Ticket
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Mandel
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)]]> 60932 Parable of the Sower continues the story of Lauren Olamina in socially and economically depressed California in the 2030s. Convinced that her community should colonize the stars, Lauren and her followers make preparations. But the collapse of society and rise of fanatics result in Lauren's followers being enslaved, and her daughter stolen from her. Now, Lauren must fight back to save the new world order.]]> 448 Octavia E. Butler 0446610380 Mandel 0 sfnal 4.31 1998 Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: sfnal
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not)]]> 418285 Noli Me Tangere has become widely known as the great novel of the Philippines. A passionate love story set against the ugly political backdrop of repression, torture, and murder, "The Noli," as it is called in the Philippines, was the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism, and Rizal became a guiding conscience—and martyr—for the revolution that would subsequently rise up in the Spanish province.]]> 444 José Rizal 0143039695 Mandel 0 asian-meetup-list, modern 4.23 1887 Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not)
author: José Rizal
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1887
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: asian-meetup-list, modern
review:

]]> Under the Eye of the Big Bird 205673377 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 288 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766114 Mandel 0 3.76 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list, japanese
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; The Complete Burton Translation with the Complete Burton Notes, The Terminal Essay, A Complete Index; Volumes 5 & 6, within Volume 3 of 3]]> 13634303
Volume 1: page 1 - 1334
Volume 2: page 1337 - 2650
Volume 3: page 2651 - 3975]]> 1334 Anonymous Mandel 0 to-read 4.20 800 The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; The Complete Burton Translation with the Complete Burton Notes, The Terminal Essay, A Complete Index; Volumes 5 & 6, within Volume 3 of 3
author: Anonymous
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.20
book published: 800
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Habilis 61020565
Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side of the search for origins.

Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that might unravel us.]]> 211 Alyssa Quinn 1950539474 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 3.69 Habilis
author: Alyssa Quinn
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> Disembodied 61239527 "I died on the twelfth of September, at the height of happiness. Clothed in the shadow of the chestnut tree outside the house, my body preserved the posture of a living woman hours after my last breath. Whereas at first I struggled with snakes under my tongue, around my ankles and my wrists, snakes clotting the blood under the skin of my lips and rearranging my limbs to fit the encasement of this new reality, I now watch lavender clouds pass by."

Christina Tudor-Sideri's debut novel is a book told in a single breath—a final breath. In the moments following her death, a nameless woman recounts, in fragments and flashes, episodes from a life that seems increasingly alien and distant to her. As her body is slowly erased by wind, water, and the earth beneath it, her voice carries on without ceasing, as if any pause would mean permanent silence. Because these are the very stakes.]]> 152 Christina Tudor-Sideri Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.28 2022 Disembodied
author: Christina Tudor-Sideri
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> Insurrecto 40237027 Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines' present and America's past by the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealer's Daughter.

Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness� of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.

Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.]]> 316 Gina Apostol 1616959444 Mandel 0 3.50 2018 Insurrecto
author: Gina Apostol
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: asian-meetup-list, east-asian, to-read
review:

]]> Eileen 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 3.57 2015 Eileen
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Mandel 0 sfnal
As all of this unfolds, Butler recounts the lives of small embattled community in a tiny suburb of south LA, struggling to hold on to kindness and community while barely staving off total annihilation. Anyone who's lived in LA and paid attention will recognize that her portrait of these people is simply a heightened version of south LA as it has been for decades. Seas of black people and other minorities struggling with poverty, the constant threat of violence, systemic exploitation, the illusory and self-destructive hope of escape through drugs and sex work - all in the shadow of the ostentatious wealth and self-important but ultimately hypocritical 'progressive' culture of West LA.

Our main character is Lauren Olamina, a remarkable young woman whose father is the backbone of this impoverished community - the local pastor who, at least for a time, inspires them to band together in faith and hold back the cruelty and suffering all around them. Lauren has a rare genetic 'disorder': hyper-empathy, which causes her to experience the suffering and joy of everyone around her as if they were her own. This is a science fiction novel, and this is its central SF conceit, but Butler leverages it to sketch a riveting and very real portrait of a person who can hold on to compassion in a desperately cold, unfeeling world.

In the story of Lauren and her family, Butler demonstrates a James Baldwin level of skill at drawing us into the strains and stresses of a tight-knit family under constant threat. Seriously: I found these parts of the novel as gripping and heart-wrenching as the best parts of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain.

And this is just the novel's first half. Once the world around Lauren crumbles further and destroys her community, she evolves into one of the most admirable and fascinating characters I've come across in fiction. Her drive, not just to survive, but to survive without losing hope, love and compassion in the most hopeless of circumstances was...well, it's been a while since I found it this difficult to tear myself away from a book.

It's sad that a lot of people won't give such a wonderful, humane novel a chance because it's science fiction. This really is an American classic and deserves to be much more well-known than it is.]]> 4.21 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: sfnal
review:
It's a perfect time to be reading Earthseed. Butler's version of America in 2024 is eerily prophetic - not quite America as it is right now, but America as it could soon become given its current tailspin. Her America is an America in precipitous decline. An America suffering from severe social fragmentation, violence and discontent. An America that has turned its back on the liberal reforms of the 20th century, with robber barons who have revived slavery through company towns and indentured servitude; right-wing demagogues stoking the fires of class and racial resentment to turn the poor and disadvantaged against one another; and religious fanatics who proudly preach the oppression of women and brutality towards anyone who doesn't embrace their dogma.

As all of this unfolds, Butler recounts the lives of small embattled community in a tiny suburb of south LA, struggling to hold on to kindness and community while barely staving off total annihilation. Anyone who's lived in LA and paid attention will recognize that her portrait of these people is simply a heightened version of south LA as it has been for decades. Seas of black people and other minorities struggling with poverty, the constant threat of violence, systemic exploitation, the illusory and self-destructive hope of escape through drugs and sex work - all in the shadow of the ostentatious wealth and self-important but ultimately hypocritical 'progressive' culture of West LA.

Our main character is Lauren Olamina, a remarkable young woman whose father is the backbone of this impoverished community - the local pastor who, at least for a time, inspires them to band together in faith and hold back the cruelty and suffering all around them. Lauren has a rare genetic 'disorder': hyper-empathy, which causes her to experience the suffering and joy of everyone around her as if they were her own. This is a science fiction novel, and this is its central SF conceit, but Butler leverages it to sketch a riveting and very real portrait of a person who can hold on to compassion in a desperately cold, unfeeling world.

In the story of Lauren and her family, Butler demonstrates a James Baldwin level of skill at drawing us into the strains and stresses of a tight-knit family under constant threat. Seriously: I found these parts of the novel as gripping and heart-wrenching as the best parts of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain.

And this is just the novel's first half. Once the world around Lauren crumbles further and destroys her community, she evolves into one of the most admirable and fascinating characters I've come across in fiction. Her drive, not just to survive, but to survive without losing hope, love and compassion in the most hopeless of circumstances was...well, it's been a while since I found it this difficult to tear myself away from a book.

It's sad that a lot of people won't give such a wonderful, humane novel a chance because it's science fiction. This really is an American classic and deserves to be much more well-known than it is.
]]> The Gamesman 660071
In a controlled and mechanical world, the only reality is fear and killing boredom. The only escape from mind-blowing monotony is the Game, with predictable rules of stimulus and response. And if you pit yourself against the Games Master, you may lose your last vestige of sanity. Or your life!]]> 188 Barry N. Malzberg 0671801740 Mandel 0 to-read 3.53 1975 The Gamesman
author: Barry N. Malzberg
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 Mandel 0 contemporary
Once I got further in, though, I realized that the way Balle was using this conceit was quite distinctive. And by the end, I was intrigued, if only by my curiosity as to how she will sustain this for six more novels. Perhaps, then, this is best read keeping firmly in mind that it's simply the first part of a septology. I'm very curious what Balle will do with her basic premise, especially given how this novel ends. Will she make it worth such an extended work? I'm hopeful, though I'm still on the fence about this introductory part. In particular, the characterization of our narrator Tara's husband Thomas struck me as somewhat weak, especially given his centrality to the book. But maybe this will have turned out to be alright - if, that is, my suspicion is correct that Thomas will ultimately not be as important to the story as he seems to be here; that the main story in this volume isn't so much that of Tara and Thomas as that of her coming to terms with the fact that her prior way of life is definitively at an end. How I look back on this part, then, is likely to depend on what Balle makes of the rest of the work as a whole.]]> 3.89 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: contemporary
review:
Early on in this book, I think my view of it was skewed somewhat by my implicitly thinking of it as a standalone novel. The basic premise is one that's been used many times before - a person forced to relive the same day over and over - and initially I was impatient with how long Balle was taking to introduce it.

Once I got further in, though, I realized that the way Balle was using this conceit was quite distinctive. And by the end, I was intrigued, if only by my curiosity as to how she will sustain this for six more novels. Perhaps, then, this is best read keeping firmly in mind that it's simply the first part of a septology. I'm very curious what Balle will do with her basic premise, especially given how this novel ends. Will she make it worth such an extended work? I'm hopeful, though I'm still on the fence about this introductory part. In particular, the characterization of our narrator Tara's husband Thomas struck me as somewhat weak, especially given his centrality to the book. But maybe this will have turned out to be alright - if, that is, my suspicion is correct that Thomas will ultimately not be as important to the story as he seems to be here; that the main story in this volume isn't so much that of Tara and Thomas as that of her coming to terms with the fact that her prior way of life is definitively at an end. How I look back on this part, then, is likely to depend on what Balle makes of the rest of the work as a whole.
]]> <![CDATA[To Live by Hua Yu (2013-08-26)]]> 162751401 0 Yu Hua Mandel 0 asian-meetup-list, east-asian 4.34 1992 To Live by Hua Yu (2013-08-26)
author: Yu Hua
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: asian-meetup-list, east-asian
review:

]]> The Making of Americans 58367 The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.]]> 926 Gertrude Stein Mandel 0 3.57 1925 The Making of Americans
author: Gertrude Stein
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1925
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: big-books-to-read, big-books-from-the-margins, currently-reading, modern
review:

]]> On a Woman's Madness 61244744 A classic of queer literature that’s as electrifying today as it was when it originally appeared in 1982, On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by the passionate romances of the present but haunted by society’s expectations and her ancestral past.

Translated into sensuous English for the first time by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer’s intimate novel—with its tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers—is a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. “I’m Noenka,� she responds resolutely, “which means Never Again.”]]> 265 Astrid H. Roemer 1949641430 Mandel 0 3.34 1982 On a Woman's Madness
author: Astrid H. Roemer
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read, contemporary, latin-american
review:

]]> Ice Trilogy 8708905
In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal.

Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.]]> 694 Vladimir Sorokin 1590173864 Mandel 0
In Ice Trilogy, Sorokin crafts a simple yet grand and haunting cosmogony and eschatology. The cosmos was created by 23,000 eternal beings of light who, in the course of crafting galaxies, stars and worlds made one crucial error: corporeal life, found solely on our tiny island of Earth. In doing so, they imprisoned themselves in material bodies, and the entire history of terrestrial life is simply the slow process of their struggle to finally reach the day when they can correct this Great Mistake.

Slowly, over the course of the entire span of 20th and early 21st centuries, the Brotherhood of the Light locates their sleeping brethren among the mass of humanity and awakens them to self-knowledge through the strange ritual of pounding their chests with hammers made from the ice of the Tunguska meteor. As their numbers grow, they plan for the day when all 23,000 of them can gather in a great circle and finally obliterate all corporeal life and thus return to their true, eternal condition.

There is a certain tedium in how Sorokin recounts this process. Once awakened, a Brother of the Light never pines for their previous human life, never experiences a moment of doubt about the absolute necessity of their cause. They are a cult of individuals whose fanaticism and faith are absolutely undiluted. Thus, the text can be repetitive. There are endless stories of people from all backgrounds, ages, walks of life - sullen teenagers, hit men, soldiers, scientists, innocent children, concentration camp victims, the rich and powerful - who, once hammered, immediately become complete and total converts to the cause. The progress of Brotherhood's endeavor is slow, but ticks away with a sense of utter inevitability, and the inevitability of an ending doesn't usually make for good storytelling.

Somehow, though, Sorokin manages to make all of this strangely, grotesquely entrancing. One even comes to empathize with the Brotherhood's utter contempt for humanity - their constant disgust at each and every vicissitude of human embodiment. This could definitely have been a shorter work - the prose at times lacks concision and drive - but for me, Sorokin always managed to keep me just shy of becoming impatient with the text.

And the ending...well, if it weren't for the ending (which I won't spoil here), I think I would have come away from this book much less impressed by it. The ending...I truly don't know what to make of it. Is it ironic? Is it earnest? Some mixture of both? I can at least say that I never once even came close to predicting the book's denouement, and I'm quite sure it will always color my entire experience of the book and make me all the more puzzled and fascinated by a work that is entirely puzzling and fascinating throughout.]]> 3.60 2006 Ice Trilogy
author: Vladimir Sorokin
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: central-and-eastern-european, contemporary
review:
This work truly defies categorization. A fabular history of the long 20th century. Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but as told, not from the perspective of human beings, but rather that of the Old Ones themselves, incomprehensibly ancient and alien. A Gnostic nightmare, or maybe an Augustinian fantasy about the power of paganism. A family epic of strangest sort imaginable. I could probably come up with more descriptions, but really I'm flailing. Say what you will - I can easily imagine readers who will despise this book - but if there's one thing I can say about, it's that I've never encountered anything like it before.

In Ice Trilogy, Sorokin crafts a simple yet grand and haunting cosmogony and eschatology. The cosmos was created by 23,000 eternal beings of light who, in the course of crafting galaxies, stars and worlds made one crucial error: corporeal life, found solely on our tiny island of Earth. In doing so, they imprisoned themselves in material bodies, and the entire history of terrestrial life is simply the slow process of their struggle to finally reach the day when they can correct this Great Mistake.

Slowly, over the course of the entire span of 20th and early 21st centuries, the Brotherhood of the Light locates their sleeping brethren among the mass of humanity and awakens them to self-knowledge through the strange ritual of pounding their chests with hammers made from the ice of the Tunguska meteor. As their numbers grow, they plan for the day when all 23,000 of them can gather in a great circle and finally obliterate all corporeal life and thus return to their true, eternal condition.

There is a certain tedium in how Sorokin recounts this process. Once awakened, a Brother of the Light never pines for their previous human life, never experiences a moment of doubt about the absolute necessity of their cause. They are a cult of individuals whose fanaticism and faith are absolutely undiluted. Thus, the text can be repetitive. There are endless stories of people from all backgrounds, ages, walks of life - sullen teenagers, hit men, soldiers, scientists, innocent children, concentration camp victims, the rich and powerful - who, once hammered, immediately become complete and total converts to the cause. The progress of Brotherhood's endeavor is slow, but ticks away with a sense of utter inevitability, and the inevitability of an ending doesn't usually make for good storytelling.

Somehow, though, Sorokin manages to make all of this strangely, grotesquely entrancing. One even comes to empathize with the Brotherhood's utter contempt for humanity - their constant disgust at each and every vicissitude of human embodiment. This could definitely have been a shorter work - the prose at times lacks concision and drive - but for me, Sorokin always managed to keep me just shy of becoming impatient with the text.

And the ending...well, if it weren't for the ending (which I won't spoil here), I think I would have come away from this book much less impressed by it. The ending...I truly don't know what to make of it. Is it ironic? Is it earnest? Some mixture of both? I can at least say that I never once even came close to predicting the book's denouement, and I'm quite sure it will always color my entire experience of the book and make me all the more puzzled and fascinated by a work that is entirely puzzling and fascinating throughout.
]]> <![CDATA[It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over]]> 177148776 128 Anne de Marcken 0811237850 Mandel 0 contemporary, sfnal The Argonauts in both good ways and bad. On the one hand, like Nelson, De Marcken is capable of such dazzling concision and clarity in her writing. There are numerous times in this book when she delivers an epiphanic knock-out punch - an image or insight that rises to the level of the best flash fiction, the best aphoristic writing.

On the other hand, though, this novel does at times have qualities that rub me ever so slightly the wrong way. First of all, there's de Marcken's frequent use of epigraphs. I'm really not a fan of epigraphs, especially when they're taken from works of philosophy or high theory and seem to be nudging the reader toward certain interpretations of the main text. More than this, though, at times the writing has the air of a diaristic blog by a humanities grad student cum influencer. Perhaps I've simply come across one too many Substacks and vlogs from folks whose main takeaway from their theory seminars seems to be that their own lives and experiences are oh-so-very-interesting objects of quasi-philosophical reflection. What the cool kids call 'autotheory' - that weird, tiny cultural niche where high theory feeds into social media narcissism, of which Maggie Nelson is simply the most well-known example.

Still, though, the fact that de Marcken's novel confers this mode of expression onto an undead character made this novel well worth the occasional internal wince these qualities elicited from me. In that respect, it bears comparison with Samuel R. Delany's èÿDz books, which likewise fuse high theory with a pulp genre - in his case, fantasy of the sword and sorcery sort. De Marcken's reflections on embodiment, on the blurry lines between life and death and between the animate and inanimate - at times these are truly stunning, beautiful, uncanny. Like the work of Delany, this is one of those books in danger of falling between the cracks simply because it's probably too literary fiction for many horror fans, and too horror for many fans of literary fiction. But the divide between 'literary fiction' and horror, fantasy and SF is a philistine hallucination anyways. I just hope it doesn't prevent this novel from getting the readership it deserves.]]> 3.69 2024 It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
author: Anne de Marcken
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: contemporary, sfnal
review:
Philosophical autofiction as written by a zombie. Seriously, though, this short novel reminds me of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts in both good ways and bad. On the one hand, like Nelson, De Marcken is capable of such dazzling concision and clarity in her writing. There are numerous times in this book when she delivers an epiphanic knock-out punch - an image or insight that rises to the level of the best flash fiction, the best aphoristic writing.

On the other hand, though, this novel does at times have qualities that rub me ever so slightly the wrong way. First of all, there's de Marcken's frequent use of epigraphs. I'm really not a fan of epigraphs, especially when they're taken from works of philosophy or high theory and seem to be nudging the reader toward certain interpretations of the main text. More than this, though, at times the writing has the air of a diaristic blog by a humanities grad student cum influencer. Perhaps I've simply come across one too many Substacks and vlogs from folks whose main takeaway from their theory seminars seems to be that their own lives and experiences are oh-so-very-interesting objects of quasi-philosophical reflection. What the cool kids call 'autotheory' - that weird, tiny cultural niche where high theory feeds into social media narcissism, of which Maggie Nelson is simply the most well-known example.

Still, though, the fact that de Marcken's novel confers this mode of expression onto an undead character made this novel well worth the occasional internal wince these qualities elicited from me. In that respect, it bears comparison with Samuel R. Delany's èÿDz books, which likewise fuse high theory with a pulp genre - in his case, fantasy of the sword and sorcery sort. De Marcken's reflections on embodiment, on the blurry lines between life and death and between the animate and inanimate - at times these are truly stunning, beautiful, uncanny. Like the work of Delany, this is one of those books in danger of falling between the cracks simply because it's probably too literary fiction for many horror fans, and too horror for many fans of literary fiction. But the divide between 'literary fiction' and horror, fantasy and SF is a philistine hallucination anyways. I just hope it doesn't prevent this novel from getting the readership it deserves.
]]> The Satanic Verses 3067592 The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.]]> 563 Salman Rushdie 0812976711 Mandel 0 The Ground Beneath Her Feet, so I was definitely not prepared. The Satanic Verses has perhaps the best opening of any book I've read. It's certainly among the wildest, funniest, and most virtuosic I've come across. An airplane explodes from a terrorist bomb 30,000 feet above the English coast, and as two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall to the earth Gibreel is transformed into the visage of the archangel Gibreel, singing and frolicking as he tumbles through the sky, while the curmudgeonly Chamcha is transformed into a demonic goat figure, grumbling and complaining the whole way down.

This opening sets the stage for a relentlessly imaginative novel that combines the zany surrealism of Gravity’s Rainbow, the numinous sublimity of ancient myth, and the postcolonial acumen of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tayeb Salih, or Franz Fanon. And, Rushdie interweaves so many stories into those of Farishta and Chamcha that this novel couldn't help but remind me of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, The Canterbury Tales, or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler - a book that is absolutely bursting with love for storytelling itself in all its many guises. It's so rich I'm quite sure I haven't been able to digest it all on just the one read, so I'm quite sure that this is a book I will read again.]]> 3.74 1988 The Satanic Verses
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: contemporary, asian-meetup-list
review:
Before this book, the only Rushdie I'd read was the comparatively tame The Ground Beneath Her Feet, so I was definitely not prepared. The Satanic Verses has perhaps the best opening of any book I've read. It's certainly among the wildest, funniest, and most virtuosic I've come across. An airplane explodes from a terrorist bomb 30,000 feet above the English coast, and as two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall to the earth Gibreel is transformed into the visage of the archangel Gibreel, singing and frolicking as he tumbles through the sky, while the curmudgeonly Chamcha is transformed into a demonic goat figure, grumbling and complaining the whole way down.

This opening sets the stage for a relentlessly imaginative novel that combines the zany surrealism of Gravity’s Rainbow, the numinous sublimity of ancient myth, and the postcolonial acumen of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tayeb Salih, or Franz Fanon. And, Rushdie interweaves so many stories into those of Farishta and Chamcha that this novel couldn't help but remind me of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, The Canterbury Tales, or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler - a book that is absolutely bursting with love for storytelling itself in all its many guises. It's so rich I'm quite sure I haven't been able to digest it all on just the one read, so I'm quite sure that this is a book I will read again.
]]> <![CDATA[The Kathá Sarit Ságara; Or, Ocean of the Streams of Story [By Somadeva] Tr. by C.H. Tawney]]> 11099958
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.

We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.]]> 692 Charles Henry Tawney 1143495845 Mandel 0 4.50 The Kathá Sarit Ságara; Or, Ocean of the Streams of Story [By Somadeva] Tr. by C.H. Tawney
author: Charles Henry Tawney
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: frame-narrative-comps, to-read
review:

]]> Lame Fate / Ugly Swans 53138863 The nested novels Ugly Swans and Lame Fate offer insight into this period of enforced silence. Never before translated into English,Lame Fate is the first-person account of middle-aged author Felix Sorokin. When the Soviet Writers� Union asks him to submit a writing sample to a newfangled machine that can supposedly evaluate the "objective value" of any literary work, he faces a dilemma. Should he present something establishment-approved but middling, or risk sharing his unpublished masterpiece, which has languished in his desk drawer for years?
Sorokin’s masterwork isUgly Swans, previously published in English as a standalone work but presented here in an authoritative new translation. Ugly Swans chronicles the travails of disgraced literary celebrity Victor Banev, who returns to his provincial hometown to find it haunted by the mysterious�black-masked men residing in a former leper colony. Possessing supernatural talents, including the ability to control the weather, the clammies terrify the town’s adult population but enthrall its teenagers, including Banev’s daughter Irma. Together, Lame Fate andUgly Swans illuminate some of the Strugatskys' favorite themes—the (im)possibility of political progress, the role of the individual in society, the nature of honor and courage, and the enduring value of art—in consummately entertaining fashion. By turns chilling, uproariousand moving, these intertwining stories are sure to delight readers from all walks of life.
]]> 416 Arkady Strugatsky 1641600713 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary, sfnal 4.03 Lame Fate / Ugly Swans
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read, contemporary, sfnal
review:

]]> Robinson Crusoe 430042 spiritual values, society, and man's abiding acquisitiveness. This new edition includes a scintillating Introduction and notes that illuminate the historical context.]]> 384 Daniel Defoe 0192833421 Mandel 0 18th-century-novel-2025 Pamela as a genuinely edifying tale of feminine virtue. Yet, it's still a wonderful novel because of how outrageously over-the-top its misogyny seems - so much so that if it were written today, it couldn't help but be received as an absurdist send-up of now completely outdated tropes.

Along these lines, Robinson Crusoe remains a delightful novel, but partly because Crusoe is such a putz, and at times a real scumbag. His constant gratitude for God's Providence is hilarious, partly because so many other of his fellows aren't shown the same 'grace'. By his own admission, he's an irreligious, foolhardy lout who nevertheless survives the ordeal that sends him to the Island of Despair while all of his shipmates die watery deaths. God must really be in your corner, ol' Robbie, and as for those other guys - well, let's not think about that. Or, when Friday quite astutely outlines the Problem of Evil to Robinson, his only reaction is to pity the poor 'savage' and berate himself for not having a good response. I grew up around not too few people like that, and while at the time I was desperately frustrated at them, now I roll my eyes and enjoy a private laugh.

Then of course, there's Crusoe's treatment of Friday. For example, Crusoe's assumption that Friday is offering himself up to be his slave for life when the poor guy simply seems grateful to Crusoe for saving his life...well, this can't but strike a modern reader as a paradigm example of European imperialist entitlement. Gross, yes, but so blatant and self-congratulatory it was hard for me not to laugh, rather as I did at the character of Brent on The Good Place.

If you aren't the type who's prone to reflexive pearl-clutching, moralizing self-righteous anger by such things - it's an 18th century novel, what did you expect? - it's possible to get a lot of amusement from these elements of Robinson Crusoe. And there's lots enjoyment to be gotten from Crusoe's lengthy recounting of how he creates for himself the rudiments of 'civilized' life on his desolate island - enjoyment perhaps of the sort that one can get from watching people clean, build, sculpt, paint, etc. on YouTube.

If all of this sounds like I'm trivializing Robinson Crusoe, like I'm neglecting its status as a foundational text for modern individualism, colonialism, for the modern novel, for what Charles Taylor calls 'the affirmation of ordinary life', and so on - believe me, I'm not. But if you lead with such things, essential as they are, you obscure the fact that it's an eminently enjoyable book to read. It isn't just a cornerstone for the stories modern western societies tell themselves about themselves (thought it is definitely that), it's incredibly engaging literature too, and fun to boot.]]> 3.33 1719 Robinson Crusoe
author: Daniel Defoe
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1719
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: 18th-century-novel-2025
review:
It's been my experience that the classic novels of 18th century British literature are entertaining in part for entirely different reasons than they probably were for people at the time. For example, I find it hard to imagine a contemporary reader who'd view Richardson's Pamela as a genuinely edifying tale of feminine virtue. Yet, it's still a wonderful novel because of how outrageously over-the-top its misogyny seems - so much so that if it were written today, it couldn't help but be received as an absurdist send-up of now completely outdated tropes.

Along these lines, Robinson Crusoe remains a delightful novel, but partly because Crusoe is such a putz, and at times a real scumbag. His constant gratitude for God's Providence is hilarious, partly because so many other of his fellows aren't shown the same 'grace'. By his own admission, he's an irreligious, foolhardy lout who nevertheless survives the ordeal that sends him to the Island of Despair while all of his shipmates die watery deaths. God must really be in your corner, ol' Robbie, and as for those other guys - well, let's not think about that. Or, when Friday quite astutely outlines the Problem of Evil to Robinson, his only reaction is to pity the poor 'savage' and berate himself for not having a good response. I grew up around not too few people like that, and while at the time I was desperately frustrated at them, now I roll my eyes and enjoy a private laugh.

Then of course, there's Crusoe's treatment of Friday. For example, Crusoe's assumption that Friday is offering himself up to be his slave for life when the poor guy simply seems grateful to Crusoe for saving his life...well, this can't but strike a modern reader as a paradigm example of European imperialist entitlement. Gross, yes, but so blatant and self-congratulatory it was hard for me not to laugh, rather as I did at the character of Brent on The Good Place.

If you aren't the type who's prone to reflexive pearl-clutching, moralizing self-righteous anger by such things - it's an 18th century novel, what did you expect? - it's possible to get a lot of amusement from these elements of Robinson Crusoe. And there's lots enjoyment to be gotten from Crusoe's lengthy recounting of how he creates for himself the rudiments of 'civilized' life on his desolate island - enjoyment perhaps of the sort that one can get from watching people clean, build, sculpt, paint, etc. on YouTube.

If all of this sounds like I'm trivializing Robinson Crusoe, like I'm neglecting its status as a foundational text for modern individualism, colonialism, for the modern novel, for what Charles Taylor calls 'the affirmation of ordinary life', and so on - believe me, I'm not. But if you lead with such things, essential as they are, you obscure the fact that it's an eminently enjoyable book to read. It isn't just a cornerstone for the stories modern western societies tell themselves about themselves (thought it is definitely that), it's incredibly engaging literature too, and fun to boot.
]]> The Wall 586852 The Wall chronicles the life of the last surviving human on earth, an ordinary middle-aged woman who awakens one morning to find that everyone else has vanished. Assuming her isolation to be the result of a military experiment gone awry, she begins the terrifying work of survival and self-renewal. This novel is at once a simple and moving tale and a disturbing meditation on humanity.
]]> 240 Marlen Haushofer 1573440949 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary, sfnal 3.99 1963 The Wall
author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read, contemporary, sfnal
review:

]]> I Who Have Never Known Men 60811826 Deep underground, forty women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.


As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.


Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.]]> 184 Jacqueline Harpman 1945492600 Mandel 0 contemporary, sfnal Lost, Silo, or From. However, Harpman's novel is, instead, a reflection on mortality and finitude, and on what becomes of a person who is systematically starved of freedom, knowledge, culture, and ordinary human contact - one so beautiful and horrifying that it had me in literal tears by the end. It's shocking to me that it isn't already a classic as firmly established beyond SF circles as 1984, The Road, Brave New World or The Handmaid's Tale. This really deserves to be considered one of the absolutely essential works of dystopian fiction.]]> 4.11 1995 I Who Have Never Known Men
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: contemporary, sfnal
review:
Forty women trapped in a cage in an underground bunker. They don't know why they're there or quite how they got there, and are guarded by men who never, ever speak to them. It sounds like the premise of the latest show on Max or Apple+ - a mystery box thriller, perhaps, in the mold of Lost, Silo, or From. However, Harpman's novel is, instead, a reflection on mortality and finitude, and on what becomes of a person who is systematically starved of freedom, knowledge, culture, and ordinary human contact - one so beautiful and horrifying that it had me in literal tears by the end. It's shocking to me that it isn't already a classic as firmly established beyond SF circles as 1984, The Road, Brave New World or The Handmaid's Tale. This really deserves to be considered one of the absolutely essential works of dystopian fiction.
]]> Treacle Walker 58205835 Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity of time, vivid storytelling that brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him.

'Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!'

Joe looked up from his comic and lifted his eye patch. There was a white pony in the yard. It was harnessed to a cart, a flat cart, with a wooden chest on it. A man was sitting at a front corner of the cart, holding the reins. His face was creased. He wore a long coat and a floppy high-crowned hat, with hair straggling beneath, and a leather bag was slung from his shoulder across his hip.

Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds' eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day - a wanderer, a healer - an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.]]> 152 Alan Garner 0008477795 Mandel 0 contemporary A Young Person's Introduction to Weird Fiction, since it strikes me as a (quite good) YA version of the genre. After finishing it, I was unsurprised to learn that M. John Harrison was on the Booker jury that longlisted it: Harrison is the absolute master of the type of storytelling on display here. If you loved this book's mystery, the way it plunges you into the uncanny, the numinous, into mystical contradictions, and you're ready for some boss-level versions of the same, may I recommend Harrison's Viriconium, or Cărtărescu's Solenoid, or Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night.]]> 3.10 2021 Treacle Walker
author: Alan Garner
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.10
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: contemporary
review:
An alternative title for this book might be A Young Person's Introduction to Weird Fiction, since it strikes me as a (quite good) YA version of the genre. After finishing it, I was unsurprised to learn that M. John Harrison was on the Booker jury that longlisted it: Harrison is the absolute master of the type of storytelling on display here. If you loved this book's mystery, the way it plunges you into the uncanny, the numinous, into mystical contradictions, and you're ready for some boss-level versions of the same, may I recommend Harrison's Viriconium, or Cărtărescu's Solenoid, or Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night.
]]> <![CDATA[In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me]]> 219528283
Beginning with Simon's remarkable childhood and exploring his relationship with his father, Ivor Raymonde (the legendary producer, musician and arranger for acts such as the Walker Brothers and songwriter for artists including Dusty Springfield), the book will journey through the musician's rise to prominence and his time with Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil.

It will also chart the successful career he has forged running his own label, Bella Union, for the past twenty-seven years, discovering and developing globally renowned artists like Beach House, Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty and John Grant. And the narrative will lead us back to the present day, reflecting on Simon's most recent experiences in the music industry - all while going deaf in one ear.

A must-read for music fans, this is the incredible tale of Simon's life and legacy.]]> 384 Simon Raymonde 1788709381 Mandel 0
Still, though, the highlights for me here were in the story of Cocteau Twins. As a kid in the 90s, I spent many hours scouring library microfiche for articles about and interviews with this notoriously reticent band, and so in many ways Simon's work here fulfills a childhood dream. Of course, when you're a music-obsessed kid, it's easy to idealize the band you love and think of their lives in quasi-epic terms. As an adult, though, I appreciated the story Simon told here: a story of three incredibly talented but ordinary people who happened to spark up something very special with one another, yet struggled as introverts in a business for extroverts, and whose ordinary lives (addictions, relationships, financial and other mishaps) were happening as they made musical magic.

As a longtime fan, I shed a tear at Simon's tribute to the late Leesa Beales, the superfan who organized CT fandom on the pre-social media internet of the 90s and 2000s, with whom I had many exchanges on email lists, discussion boards, and chatrooms. I learned a lot about CT's creative process, and of course about Simon's own perspective on it. Of course, I would love to have learned more about Liz Fraser's lyric-writing process, or about how Robin Guthrie achieved CT's lush, ethereal sound, but those aren't really Simon's stories to tell. So, I hope Liz and/or Robin decide to write memoirs of their own one day..]]> 4.32 In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me
author: Simon Raymonde
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
I almost never read memoirs, but Cocteau Twins are my favorite band of all time, so of course I would read this. And knowing the band as I do, I knew not to expect salacious revelations or shit-talking: Liz Fraser, Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde have always been private, self-effacing, and meek in the public eye. But such things don't interest me anyway: I came to this to hear the story of Cocteau Twins and, to a lesser degree, of the music label they created, Bella Union. At first, I was half-expecting to be bored by Simon's recounting of his early life, and by his long digression into the life story of his father, the jazz musician Ivor Raymonde. However, the warm, witty quality of Simon's authorial voice (and his literal one, since I read this as an audiobook) made these parts quite enjoyable.

Still, though, the highlights for me here were in the story of Cocteau Twins. As a kid in the 90s, I spent many hours scouring library microfiche for articles about and interviews with this notoriously reticent band, and so in many ways Simon's work here fulfills a childhood dream. Of course, when you're a music-obsessed kid, it's easy to idealize the band you love and think of their lives in quasi-epic terms. As an adult, though, I appreciated the story Simon told here: a story of three incredibly talented but ordinary people who happened to spark up something very special with one another, yet struggled as introverts in a business for extroverts, and whose ordinary lives (addictions, relationships, financial and other mishaps) were happening as they made musical magic.

As a longtime fan, I shed a tear at Simon's tribute to the late Leesa Beales, the superfan who organized CT fandom on the pre-social media internet of the 90s and 2000s, with whom I had many exchanges on email lists, discussion boards, and chatrooms. I learned a lot about CT's creative process, and of course about Simon's own perspective on it. Of course, I would love to have learned more about Liz Fraser's lyric-writing process, or about how Robin Guthrie achieved CT's lush, ethereal sound, but those aren't really Simon's stories to tell. So, I hope Liz and/or Robin decide to write memoirs of their own one day..
]]> The Mysteries of Udolpho 93134 The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe raised the Gothic romance to a new level and inspired a long line of imitators. Portraying her heroine's inner life, creating a thick atmosphere of fear, and providing a gripping plot that continues to thrill readers today, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the story of orphan Emily St. Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her.

This new edition includes an introduction that discusses the publication and early reception of the novel, the genre of Gothic romance, and Radcliffe's use of history, exotic settings, the supernatural, and poetry.]]> 654 Ann Radcliffe 0140437592 Mandel 0 3.42 1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho
author: Ann Radcliffe
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1794
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read, 18th-century-novel-2025
review:

]]> Gulliver’s Travels 7733 A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver's final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire - in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans. This text, based on the first edition of 1726, reproduces all the original illustrations and includes an introduction by Robert Demaria, Jr, which discusses the ways Gulliver's Travels has been interpreted since its first publication. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 306 Jonathan Swift 0141439491 Mandel 0 3.59 1726 Gulliver’s Travels
author: Jonathan Swift
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1726
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read, 18th-century-novel-2025
review:

]]> Moll Flanders 38262 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781853260735.

The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (aka Moll Flanders) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1722. It purports to be the true account of the life of the eponymous Moll, detailing her exploits from birth until old age.

By 1721, Defoe had become a recognised novelist, with the success of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. His political work was tapering off at this point, due to the fall of both Whig and Tory party leaders with whom he had been associated (Robert Walpole was beginning his rise). Defoe was never fully at home with the Walpole group. Defoe's Whig views are nevertheless evident in the story of Moll. The novel's full title gives some insight into this and the outline of the plot: "The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, & during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, & died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums."]]> 339 Daniel Defoe Mandel 0 3.53 1722 Moll Flanders
author: Daniel Defoe
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1722
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read, 18th-century-novel-2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman]]> 76527
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations. The text and notes of this volume are based on the acclaimed Florida Edition, with a critical introduction by Melvyn New and Christopher Ricks's introductory essay from the first Penguin Classics edition.]]> 735 Laurence Sterne 0141439777 Mandel 0 3.72 1767 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
author: Laurence Sterne
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1767
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read, 18th-century-novel-2025
review:

]]> Little Eyes 48635845 A visionary novel about the collision of technology and play, horror and humanity, from a master of the spine-tingling tale.

They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of Senegal, town squares of Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Ohio. They're following you. They're everywhere now. They're us.

In Samanta Schweblin's wildly imaginative new novel, Little Eyes, "kentukis" have gone viral across the globe. They're little mechanical stuffed animals that have cameras for eyes, wheels for feet, and are connected to an anonymous global server. Owners of kentukis have the eyes of a stranger in their home and a cute squeaking pet following them; or you can be the kentuki and voyeuristically spend time in someone else's life, controlling the creature with a few keystrokes. Through kentukis, a jaded Croatian hustler stumbles into a massive criminal enterprise and saves a life in Brazil, a lonely old woman in Peru becomes fascinated with a young woman and her louche lover in Germany, and a motherless child in Antigua finds a new virtual family and experiences snow for the first time in Norway.

These creatures can reveal the beauty of connection between farflung souls - but they also expose the ugly humanity of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love and marvelous adventure, but what happens when the kentukis pave the way for unimaginable terror?]]> 256 Samanta Schweblin 0525541365 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.59 2018 Little Eyes
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> The Thing Itself 26187256 352 Adam Roberts 0575127724 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.60 2015 The Thing Itself
author: Adam Roberts
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> The Glamour 106924 235 Christopher Priest 0575075791 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.83 1984 The Glamour
author: Christopher Priest
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> The Midwich Cuckoos 161846 220 John Wyndham 0345299116 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.91 1957 The Midwich Cuckoos
author: John Wyndham
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> The Philosopher's Stone 715738 320 Colin Wilson 0446330302 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.94 1969 The Philosopher's Stone
author: Colin Wilson
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> Northwest Smith 941224
Here is the mystery and glory of the universe. Here is a legend come to life. Here is Northwest Smith.

Contents:
Shambleau.
Black Thirst.
The Tree of Life.
Scarlet Dream.
Dust of the Gods.
Lost Paradise.
Julhi.
The Cold Gray God.
Yvala.
Song in a Minor Key.]]> 297 C.L. Moore 0441586139 Mandel 0 to-read, sfnal 3.79 1982 Northwest Smith
author: C.L. Moore
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, sfnal
review:

]]> The Most Secret Memory of Men 123557124
Paris, 2018. Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book published in 1938 titled The Maze of Inhumanity . No one knows what happened to the author, T.C. Elimane, once referred to as the “Black Rimbaud.� After he was accused of plagiarism, his reputation was destroyed by the critics. He subsequently disappeared without a trace.

Curiosity turns to obsession, and Faye embarks on a quest to uncover the fate of the mysterious T.C. Elimane. His search weaves past and present, countries and continents, following the author’s labyrinthine trail from Senegal to Argentina and France and confronting the great tragedies of history.

Alongside his investigation, Faye becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. They talk, drink, make love, and philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation. He becomes particularly close to two women: the seductive Siga, keeper of secrets, and the fleeting photojournalist Aïda.

But throughout, a question persists: will he get to the truth at the center of the maze?

A gripping detective novel without a detective and a masterpiece of perpetual reinvention, The Most Secret Memory of Men confronts the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the holocaust in Europe, dictatorships in South America and the Caribbean, genocide in Africa, and collaboration and resistance everywhere. Above all, it is a love song to literature and its timeless power.]]> 496 Mohamed Mbougar Sarr 1668005689 Mandel 0 to-read, africana 4.19 2021 The Most Secret Memory of Men
author: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read, africana
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence]]> 197055873
For too long, Africa's history has been neglected. Dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, its past has been fragmented, overlooked and denied its rightful place in our global story.

Now, Zeinab Badawi guides us through Africa's spectacular history, from the origins of humanity, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with powerful queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.

Seeking out occluded histories from across the continent, meeting with countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, and travelling through more than thirty countries, Badawi weaves together a fascinating new account of an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.]]> 531 Zeinab Badawi 0753560151 Mandel 0 The History of Africa, which I watched through a couple years ago when my reading group spent a year reading sub-Saharan African literature. It's definitely an introductory popular history, so it's unlikely to please history buffs, but I was just seeking a better general knowledge of African history, which I'm ashamed to say was almost non-existent before watching Badawi's series. Mostly, I'm hoping the book can function as a 'booster shot' in my reading of African literature, which I haven't advanced much since that year with my reading group.]]> 4.02 2024 An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
author: Zeinab Badawi
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
This book is the outgrowth of Badawi's documentary series for the BBC, The History of Africa, which I watched through a couple years ago when my reading group spent a year reading sub-Saharan African literature. It's definitely an introductory popular history, so it's unlikely to please history buffs, but I was just seeking a better general knowledge of African history, which I'm ashamed to say was almost non-existent before watching Badawi's series. Mostly, I'm hoping the book can function as a 'booster shot' in my reading of African literature, which I haven't advanced much since that year with my reading group.
]]> How to Do Things with Words 333832 How to Do Things with Words.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary. Students will find the new text clearer, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual lectures. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin's work.]]> 168 J.L. Austin 0674411528 Mandel 0 3.95 1955 How to Do Things with Words
author: J.L. Austin
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Too Loud a Solitude 87280 TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE is a tender and funny story of Haňťa - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetrator.

But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship.

This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructability- against censorship, political opression etc - of the written word.

]]> 112 Bohumil Hrabal 0349102627 Mandel 0 4.17 1976 Too Loud a Solitude
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: central-and-eastern-european, to-read
review:

]]> The Royal Family 300736 New Yorker in 1999, Vollmann received the best reviews of his career for The Royal Family, a searing fictional trip through a San Francisco underworld populated by prostitutes, drug addicts, and urban spiritual seekers. Part biblical allegory and part skewed postmodern crime novel, The Royal Family is a vivid and unforgettable work of fiction by one of today's most daring writers.]]> 780 William T. Vollmann 014100200X Mandel 0 lit-24, contemporary
So, this is a novel for those of us who would love to depart to the land of Nod but are too afraid, too attached to the liminal world between Eden and Hell. Vollmann forges beauty out of the lowest depths of American poverty and desperation, but at the same time confronts us with our own collective complicity in it. If John Tyler is Abel and Henry Tyler is Cain, the Queen around whom the entire novel revolves is Lilith, and maybe Vollmann himself: someone who takes the side of everyone who lives in exile from the cruel hypocrisy of American society, and who for that reason can only shine for a brief moment and be forgotten.]]> 3.94 2000 The Royal Family
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: lit-24, contemporary
review:
Anyone who has allowed themselves to see, really see the hellscapes of American urban squalor will recognize the people that populate this novel: addicts, sex workers, the homeless, the mentally ill, the just plain broken. Most people, I suspect, though, won't be able to tolerate the reality of these people's lives as Vollmann presents it. They'll shrink away in disgust, not quite able to allow themselves to believe that this is America: the same self-induced amnesia that allows millions to pass such people on the city streets day after day.

So, this is a novel for those of us who would love to depart to the land of Nod but are too afraid, too attached to the liminal world between Eden and Hell. Vollmann forges beauty out of the lowest depths of American poverty and desperation, but at the same time confronts us with our own collective complicity in it. If John Tyler is Abel and Henry Tyler is Cain, the Queen around whom the entire novel revolves is Lilith, and maybe Vollmann himself: someone who takes the side of everyone who lives in exile from the cruel hypocrisy of American society, and who for that reason can only shine for a brief moment and be forgotten.
]]> Barefoot Doctor 60747393 A profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, from one of the world’s great contemporary novelists

In rural Yun Village, herbalist Mrs. Yi lives with her husband in a cottage at the foot of Niulan Mountain, where she gathers herbs to treat the ailments of the villagers by day and studies medicine by night. Sickness and herbs are lovers, she tells her patients, rejoicing when they recover, comforting them when they do not. All the while, she hopes to find a worthy successor to take up her mantle. As curious younger villagers observe Mrs. Yi and begin imitating her work—planting gardens and studying the art of healing—they soon discover that the line dividing life from death is porous, and the mountain is more mysterious than they ever knew.

Drawing on her experiences as a barefoot doctor in her youth, Can Xue returns with a transporting novel that alights in the in-between spaces: between the living and the dead, healer and sick, nature and us.]]> 272 Can Xue 0300259638 Mandel 0 east-asian
After a while, though, I found myself wondering where it was going. Usually, plot doesn't matter to me much: most of my favorite books are utterly plotless. Yet, in the case of Barefoot Doctor, I kept hoping a plot would coalesce. Its oneiric directionlessness began to wear on me, and although there were still moments of poignant wonder - Spoon breaking up with Gray by escaping in the jaws of a passing tiger, for example - eventually I was just forcing my way through it just to get it over and done with.

Still, though, there is enough here to make me want to dip into Xue's other books. I keep thinking to myself: not even all of Apichatpong's films work for me, so perhaps I just happened to dive into Xue's body of work in the wrong place.]]> 3.35 2019 Barefoot Doctor
author: Can Xue
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: east-asian
review:
I have mixed feelings about this novel. For the first half or so, I found it enchanting. Its prose oscillates with the rhythms of a folktale, yet one that meanders dreamily. Its atmosphere reminded me of nothing so much as the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is perhaps my favorite living director - meditative calm punctuated by moments of uncanny yet gentle strangeness.

After a while, though, I found myself wondering where it was going. Usually, plot doesn't matter to me much: most of my favorite books are utterly plotless. Yet, in the case of Barefoot Doctor, I kept hoping a plot would coalesce. Its oneiric directionlessness began to wear on me, and although there were still moments of poignant wonder - Spoon breaking up with Gray by escaping in the jaws of a passing tiger, for example - eventually I was just forcing my way through it just to get it over and done with.

Still, though, there is enough here to make me want to dip into Xue's other books. I keep thinking to myself: not even all of Apichatpong's films work for me, so perhaps I just happened to dive into Xue's body of work in the wrong place.
]]> Hard Rain Falling 6553843 308 Don Carpenter 1590173244 Mandel 0 contemporary Hard Rain Falling was going to be: the story of a single man's struggles. And, although this is indeed what it is, I didn't expect just how ambitious it would turn out to be in its sweeping depictions of class, race, gender and sexuality. Most astonishingly, it succeeds in these ambitions - a novel that stands shoulder to shoulder with Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy and Baldwin's Another Country as one of the great epics of mid-20th century American life. How exactly did this novel fall through the cracks of literary history for so damn long?]]> 4.13 1966 Hard Rain Falling
author: Don Carpenter
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: contemporary
review:
Just a few chapters in, I thought I knew what Hard Rain Falling was going to be: the story of a single man's struggles. And, although this is indeed what it is, I didn't expect just how ambitious it would turn out to be in its sweeping depictions of class, race, gender and sexuality. Most astonishingly, it succeeds in these ambitions - a novel that stands shoulder to shoulder with Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy and Baldwin's Another Country as one of the great epics of mid-20th century American life. How exactly did this novel fall through the cracks of literary history for so damn long?
]]> Berg 912596
So begins Ann Quin's first novel, which has been compared to the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute. Against the backdrop of this gritty seaside town, an absurd and brutal plot develops involving three characters - Alistair Berg, his father, and their mutual mistress. In his attempt to kill his father, Berg mutilates a ventriloquist's dummy, almost falls victim to his father's mistaken sexual advances, and is relentlessly taunted by a group of tramps. Disturbing and at times startlingly comic, Berg chronicles the interrelations among these three characters as they circle one another in an escalating spiral of violence.]]> 168 Ann Quin 1564783022 Mandel 0 modern
Quin begins with this sentence - a high concept elevator pitch if ever there was one. Hold on to this sentence, let it be your anchor, because little else in this novel will be this straightforward. The lines between reality, fantasy and delusion are so blurred as to be nonexistent. In this respect, Berg reminds me of nothing so much as Donoso's comparably bleak and twisted novel The Obscene Bird of Night, which for me is high praise indeed. Does Berg actually kill his father? Does he ever really even try? Does his father seduce him, or even befriend him, or is Berg just the creepy stranger living down the hall? Does Berg seduce his father's mistress Judith? Does she seduce him? Do they adore him or hate him, do they ever even meet him? To each of these questions, the answer is both 'yes' and 'no.' Instead of answers, we get a tangle of possibilities, each of which is fascinating, mesmerizingly strange, making for a dreamscape of a novel that I won't soon forget.]]> 3.87 1964 Berg
author: Ann Quin
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: modern
review:
"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father..."

Quin begins with this sentence - a high concept elevator pitch if ever there was one. Hold on to this sentence, let it be your anchor, because little else in this novel will be this straightforward. The lines between reality, fantasy and delusion are so blurred as to be nonexistent. In this respect, Berg reminds me of nothing so much as Donoso's comparably bleak and twisted novel The Obscene Bird of Night, which for me is high praise indeed. Does Berg actually kill his father? Does he ever really even try? Does his father seduce him, or even befriend him, or is Berg just the creepy stranger living down the hall? Does Berg seduce his father's mistress Judith? Does she seduce him? Do they adore him or hate him, do they ever even meet him? To each of these questions, the answer is both 'yes' and 'no.' Instead of answers, we get a tangle of possibilities, each of which is fascinating, mesmerizingly strange, making for a dreamscape of a novel that I won't soon forget.
]]> <![CDATA[Man-Eating Typewriter: Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023]]> 75560806 0 Richard Milward Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.05 Man-Eating Typewriter: Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023
author: Richard Milward
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> Poguemahone 59241152
And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.

Poguemahone is a wild, free-verse monologue, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.]]> 624 Patrick McCabe 1800181116 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 3.91 2022 Poguemahone
author: Patrick McCabe
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun]]> 7312194 'The Real Story of Ah-Q', 'Diary of a Madman', 'The Divorce,' and 'New Year's Sacrifice', among others.

Julia Lovell's new translation of Lu Xun's short stories is accompanied by an introduction to the writer's political and literary life. This edition also includes suggested further reading, a note on Chinese names and pronunciation, a chronology, and notes.]]> 416 Lu Xun 0140455485 Mandel 0 asian-meetup-list, to-read 3.89 1936 The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun
author: Lu Xun
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1936
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: asian-meetup-list, to-read
review:

]]> Vacated Landscape 211200280
A portrait of obsession, Vacated Landscape is both ingeniously fractal, with sentences that are tiny scale models of the larger narrative, and exuberantly byzantine, full of long parentheticals and odd circumlocutions that form a tantalizing labyrinth that sits somewhere between Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Kafka’s The Castle.]]> 199 Jean Lahougue 1939663970 Mandel 0 to-read, modern 3.72 1977 Vacated Landscape
author: Jean Lahougue
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read, modern
review:

]]> The Demons 466712 1340 Heimito von Doderer 1557130302 Mandel 0 to-read, modern 4.57 1956 The Demons
author: Heimito von Doderer
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1956
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read, modern
review:

]]> Wild Horses 59491551 Wild Horses tells the story of a group of friends as they buy, sell, and consume heroin and other drugs in their hometown. Told through a kaleidoscope of voices, stories, song lyrics, and heartbreakingly all-too-real characters, Cussà’s novel, originally published in 2000, is already a true classic of modern storytelling that is both shocking and captivating at the same time.]]> 376 Jordi Cussà 1913744051 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.08 2000 Wild Horses
author: Jordi Cussà
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Reign in Hell: Selected Works]]> 216120603
Although Crisp’s writing here operates outside the norms of conventional genre tropes, his stories are often rooted in elements of the supernatural. For instance, he channels his inner Lovecraft in “The Recluse,� which sees the discovery of a hermit’s arcane language that leads to a new sort of freedom not yet known by man. In “The Mermaid� the fairy tale cliché of living happily ever after is morphed into a hideous nightmare when a beachcomber’s fantasy comes to fruition but at the expense of his lust for perfection.
With “The Legacy� Crisp preys on the most primal of fears: arachnophobia. Deep-seeded childhood trauma is usually the culprit, but fear can also be inborn. And for one grandson clearing out his deceased grandmother’s house, it becomes a family heirloom best left for the incinerator.

However, Crisp also branches out into the realm of magical prose with stories that may just restore your faith in humanity. “Far-Off Things� is innocence personified for a boy whose only glimpse at love is in a girl he adores from afar, proving that love is fleeting and should always be cherished. Similarly, “Italiannetto� is a touching evocation and reminder of the platonic relationships in one’s life � where true love can be found in more than just romance.

In two ambitious, never-before published novellas, Crisp ventures into a newfound arena of narrative form. His “Scorpion and the Butterfly� is like gurus gone wild beyond the grave. The eternal dance of parrying for position never dies with death; it only grows stronger. While “Fractalism� is a cerebral look at a man’s botanical influence on himself and his surroundings, leading him to uncover an unlikely villain within his metamorphosis.

You may not see the humor in I Reign in Hell, but the title alone will tell you all you need to know about Quentin S. Crisp. He is never one to pass up a clever dig at the literary powers that be. And I Reign in Hell is no longer an unfulfilled publication dream: it’s a moment of déjà vu come to life.

Contents
The Legacy
The Psychopomps
The Mermaid
Far-Off Things
The Recluse
Unimaginable Joys
Italianetto
Suicide Watch
Scorpion And Butterfly
Fractalism
Petseta
The Little One: A Meditation
Nail Soup For The Soul

� Signed by Quentin S. Crisp and artist Harry Brockway.
� 500 signed copies.
� Bound in three-piece black and red Skivertex cloth.
� Dustjacket, frontispiece, and individual story art by Harry Brockway.
� Patterned endpapers.
� Head and tail bands.
� 5¾ × 8½ inches.
� 600 pages.
� Published June 2024.
� ISBN 978-1-61347-084-8.]]> 600 Quentin S. Crisp 1613470843 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.64 2024 I Reign in Hell: Selected Works
author: Quentin S. Crisp
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> The Glister 5941264 Here, a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state of confusion and despair, as every year or so a boy from their school vanishes after venturing into the poisoned woods. Without conclusive evidence of foul play, the authorities consider the boys to be runaways.
The town policeman suspects otherwise but, paralyzed with fear, he does nothing. And so it is up to the children who remain to take action. Their plan to stop the forces of evil that are destroying their town is at the shocking and terrifying heart of]]> 228 John Burnside 0385527640 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 3.13 2008 The Glister
author: John Burnside
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> The Tunnel 156182 The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language.]]> 652 William H. Gass 1564782131 Mandel 0 3.99 1995 The Tunnel
author: William H. Gass
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: currently-reading, contemporary
review:

]]> The Ship 2782549 The Ship is a unique book. Reading it is like listening to the silence in the public squares painted by Giorgio de Chirico. Like Chirico, Jahnn is a master of the eerie and the inexplicable. It would be presumptuous to explain the fable contained in these pages; its meaning will differ from reader to reader. Yet it is obvious that the author intended us to know that our hold on reality is at best a treacherous delusion.

When Gustav bent down to retrieve the suitcase he had so thoughtlessly kicked under the berth, he found that where a wall should have been there was no wall but only infinite space. Since this three-masted ship had been designed by a competent Scot, Gustav was puzzled. But he had only begun to be bewildered. Locked doors sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand, and the supercargo was unwilling to dispel anxiety with an answer. With microphones placed at strategic points throughout the ship, the supercargo spied on everyone, angrily insisting that no member of the crew should attempt to fathom the nature of the cargo.

When Gustav’s fiancee vanished, Gustav acted less like a hero than a victim of a nightmare. The Ship itself is a nightmare, contrived by a writer with an iron will.]]> 210 Hans Henny Jahnn Mandel 0 to-read, modern 4.08 1949 The Ship
author: Hans Henny Jahnn
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, modern
review:

]]> Fury: A Novel 154431847
� Fury has the poetic and wild force of the desert. In its pages there is tenderness, fear and forceful, rhythmic writing with images that are difficult to forget. It is about the violence of desire that turns us into dogs that drool, howl and bite, but also about love in the midst of hostility and helplessness. This is why it is a disturbing and, at the same time, deeply moving novel.� —Mónica Ojeda

In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men—and of their mothers, lovers and companions—Mendoza explores her characters� passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.

After winning the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.

"An amazing, hypnotic and beautiful novel, like contemplating the desert." —Juan Pablo Villalobos]]> 233 Clyo Mendoza 1644213729 Mandel 0 to-read, latin-american 3.87 Fury: A Novel
author: Clyo Mendoza
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, latin-american
review:

]]> Same Bed Different Dreams 122993405
In 1919, far-flung Korean patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the North-South split that remains today.

But what if the KPG still existed now, today—working toward a unified Korea, secretly harnessing the might of a giant tech company to further its aims? That’s the outrageous premise of Same Bed Different Dreams, which weaves together three distinct narrative voices and an archive of mysterious images and twists reality like a kaleidoscope, spinning Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives into an extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

Early on we meet Soon Sheen, who works at the sprawling international technology company GLOAT, and comes into possession of an unfinished book authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a mysterious, revisionist history, tying famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project. This strange manuscript links together figures from architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London to Marilyn Monroe. M*A*S*H is in here, too, and the Moonies, and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

Just as foreign countries have imposed their desires on Korea, so too has Park tucked different dreamers into this sprawling bed of a novel. Among them: Parker Jotter, Korean War vet and appliance-store owner, who saw something--a UFO?--while flying over North Korea; Nora You, nail salon magnate; and Monk Zingapan, game designer turned writing guru. Their links are revealed over time, even as the dreamers remain in the dark as to their own interconnectedness. A thrilling feat of imagination and a step forward from an award-winning author, Same Bed Different Dreams begins as a comic novel and gradually pulls readers into another dimension—one in which utopia is possible.]]> 528 Ed Park 0812998979 Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 3.72 2023 Same Bed Different Dreams
author: Ed Park
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll]]> 71490 700 Álvaro Mutis 0940322919 Mandel 0 to-read, latin-american 4.34 1993 The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
author: Álvaro Mutis
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, latin-american
review:

]]> A Bended Circuity 58878059 Some of the best writing to come out of any known region of any south anywhere, this inventive maximalist demi-comedy will convince readers that the latest great generation of writers was not that ending with the coming death of William Vollman, to whom Robert S. Stickley compares favorably.
Hint to impatient readers: wait for Dyxsov.]]> 639 Robert S. Stickley Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.39 2022 A Bended Circuity
author: Robert S. Stickley
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anarchist Who Shared My Name]]> 41093176
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name is an elegantly written exploration of a dark time in Spanish history, blending key elements of historical fact with richly imaginative fiction as Martín Sánchez reconstructs the occurrences that led his protagonist to his untimely outcome. Through references to figures such as Miguel de Unamuno and Victor Blasco Ibañez, and landmark events such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Verdun, Martín Sánchez takes us on an odyssey through the anarchist’s childhood and exile from Spain, to his life as a typesetter in Paris and his eventual involvement in revolt against a tyrannical government.]]> 624 Pablo Martín Sánchez 1941920713 Mandel 0 to-read, latin-american 4.50 2012 The Anarchist Who Shared My Name
author: Pablo Martín Sánchez
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, latin-american
review:

]]> The Garden 209553021
Yet a darker shadow looms over their journey. They are pursued relentlessly by an enigmatic adversary and his acolytes, an alchemic and malevolent force consumed by a twisted vision of remaking the world, leaving behind only ashes and a trail drenched in the crimson echoes of his relentless ambitions. As they navigate this unforgiving landscape the world teeters on the precipice of a profound occult metamorphosis where the seeds of fascism may also be seen to take root beneath the banner of manifest destiny.

In the bleak and disquieting prose of his debut novel Aidan Scott weaves a haunting tale of survival, morality and the eerie birth of an unsettling future where the land itself will bear witness to the horrors of humanity’s inexorable pursuit of power and a destiny shrouded in enigma and dread.]]> 400 Aidan Scott Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.71 The Garden
author: Aidan Scott
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.71
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?]]> 857451 A.D. Nuttall 0198187661 Mandel 0 to-read, aristotle-poetics 3.24 1996 Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?
author: A.D. Nuttall
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.24
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read, aristotle-poetics
review:

]]> Uzumaki 17837762
Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral � the hypnotic secret shape of the world. This bizarre masterpiece of horror manga is now available in a single volume. Fall into a whirlpool of terror!]]> 653 Junji Ito 1421561328 Mandel 0 asian-meetup-list 4.45 2000 Uzumaki
author: Junji Ito
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> The Sovereignty of Good 11232 105 Iris Murdoch 0415253993 Mandel 0 phil-24, philosophy, to-read 4.06 1970 The Sovereignty of Good
author: Iris Murdoch
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: phil-24, philosophy, to-read
review:

]]> Human Acts 30091914 A riveting, poetic, and fearless portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice by the acclaimed author of The Vegetarian.

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend, who meets his own fateful end, to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, both suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother, their collective heartbreak and acts of hope tell the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 218 Han Kang 1101906723 Mandel 0 asian-meetup-list, korean 4.26 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: asian-meetup-list, korean
review:

]]> Invidicum 135735335 1196 Michael Brodsky Mandel 0 to-read, contemporary 4.38 Invidicum
author: Michael Brodsky
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read, contemporary
review:

]]> River of Fire (Aag Ka Darya) 902366
Interweaving parables, legends, dreams, diaries, and letters, Hyder's prose is lyrical and witty. There is really no book like River of Fire. Qurratulain Hyder was awarded the Bharatiya Gnanpith, India's highest literary award, in 1989, and here is her masterpiece, her broadest canvas and her finest art.]]> 428 Qurratulain Hyder 0811214184 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 4.07 1959 River of Fire (Aag Ka Darya)
author: Qurratulain Hyder
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> The Pilgrim 135621678 0 Laxmi Prasad Devkota Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 0.0 The Pilgrim
author: Laxmi Prasad Devkota
name: Mandel
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> Pedro Páramo 38787
As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.]]> 124 Juan Rulfo 0802133908 Mandel 0 modern, latin-american cacique - a feudal lord, almost - over the humble village of Comala. Because the novel is dominated by an air of fragmentation, mystery, and misery, Páramo is in some ways reminiscent of Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, or even There Will Be Blood's Daniel Plainview. Like these characters, Páramo is plagued by an inner darkness that might in others remain hidden from view. However, his wealth and power allow him to rain this darkness upon the people whom he dominates - murdering, raping, humiliating and tormenting others at will. But the novel is also Gothic in being a ghost story - spirits and the living are often interchangeable and indistinguishable, an effect created most of all by the fact that Rulfo's very brief chapters jump dizzyingly back and forth through time, creating a kind of purgatorial time - time that doesn't unfold linearly but always remains in flux, so that the past, present and future cohabitate and haunt one another. ]]> 4.06 1955 Pedro Páramo
author: Juan Rulfo
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: modern, latin-american
review:
I've heard this novel described as Mexican Gothic, and the label is apt. The central story is that of Pedro Páramo himself, the ranch owner who as rules as a cacique - a feudal lord, almost - over the humble village of Comala. Because the novel is dominated by an air of fragmentation, mystery, and misery, Páramo is in some ways reminiscent of Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, or even There Will Be Blood's Daniel Plainview. Like these characters, Páramo is plagued by an inner darkness that might in others remain hidden from view. However, his wealth and power allow him to rain this darkness upon the people whom he dominates - murdering, raping, humiliating and tormenting others at will. But the novel is also Gothic in being a ghost story - spirits and the living are often interchangeable and indistinguishable, an effect created most of all by the fact that Rulfo's very brief chapters jump dizzyingly back and forth through time, creating a kind of purgatorial time - time that doesn't unfold linearly but always remains in flux, so that the past, present and future cohabitate and haunt one another.
]]> The Obscene Bird of Night 382975
The story is like a great puzzle . . . invested with a vibrant, almost tangible reality.
—The New York Times

Although many of the other “boom� writers may have received more attention—especially Fuentes and Vargas Llosa—Donoso and his masterpiece may be the most lasting, visionary, strangest of the books from this time period. Seriously, it’s a novel about the last member of an aristocratic family, a monstrous mutant, who is surrounded by other freaks so as to not feel out of place.
—Publishers Weekly

Nicola Barker has said:

"I'm no expert on the topic of South American literature (in fact I'm a dunce), but I have reason to believe (after diligently scouring the internet) that Chile's Jose Donoso, while a very highly regarded author on home turf, is little known on this side of the Atlantic. His masterpiece is the fabulously entitled The Obscene Bird of Night. It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole."]]> 438 José Donoso 1567920462 Mandel 0 latin-american, modern 4.16 1970 The Obscene Bird of Night
author: José Donoso
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: latin-american, modern
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Magician of Lublin (Isaac Bashevis Singer: Classic Editions)]]> 57308659 183 Isaac Bashevis Singer 1632922258 Mandel 0 4.19 1960 The Magician of Lublin (Isaac Bashevis Singer: Classic Editions)
author: Isaac Bashevis Singer
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1960
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: modern, central-and-eastern-european
review:

]]> The Reasons of Love 3494

Harry Frankfurt writes that it is through caring that we infuse the world with meaning. Caring provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it shapes the framework of aims and interests within which we lead our lives. The most basic and essential question for a person to raise about the conduct of his or her life is not what he or she should care about but what, in fact, he or she cannot help caring about.


The most important form of caring, Frankfurt writes, is love, a nonvoluntary, disinterested concern for the flourishing of what is loved. Love is so important because meaningful practical reasoning must be grounded in ends that we do not seek only to attain other ends, and because it is in loving that we become bound to final ends desired for their own sakes.


Frankfurt argues that the purest form of love is self-love. This sounds perverse, but self-love--as distinct from self-indulgence--is at heart a disinterested concern for whatever it is that the person loves. The most elementary form of self-love is nothing more than the desire of a person to love. Insofar as this is true, self-love is simply a commitment to finding meaning in our lives.]]> 100 Harry G. Frankfurt 0691126240 Mandel 0 philosophy 3.73 2004 The Reasons of Love
author: Harry G. Frankfurt
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: philosophy
review:

]]> The Street of Crocodiles 244261
Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.]]> 160 Bruno Schulz 0140186255 Mandel 0 modern 4.18 1933 The Street of Crocodiles
author: Bruno Schulz
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1933
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: modern
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library) by Franz Kafka (1999) Paperback]]> 134567410 0 Franz Kafka Mandel 0 modern 3.88 1925 The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library) by Franz Kafka (1999) Paperback
author: Franz Kafka
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1925
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: modern
review:

]]> The Railway 1006277 "It is a work of rare beauty—an utterly readable, compelling book." —Craig Murray, New Statesman

"All picaresque exuberance, a jumble of influences from Persian to Soviet and beyond." —Catherine Lockerbie, Sunday Herald

“In the steppe near Tashkent they came upon a never-ending ladder with wooden rungs and iron rails and that stretched across the earth from horizon to horizon ... Whistling and thundering, a snake-like wonder hurtled past them, packed both on the inside and on top with infidels shouting and waving their hands. ‘The End of the World!� thought both Mahmud-Hodja the Sunni and Djebral the Shiite.�

Set mainly in Uzbekistan between 1900 and 1980, The Railway introduces to us the inhabitants of the small town of Gilas on the ancient Silk Route. Among those whose stories we hear are Mefody-Jurisprudence, the town's alcoholic intellectual; Father Ioann, a Russian priest; Kara-Musayev the Younger, the chief of police; and Umarali-Moneybags, the old moneylender. Their colorful lives offer a unique and comic picture of a little-known land populated by outgoing Mullahs, incoming Bolsheviks, and a plethora of Uzbeks, Russians, Persians, Jews, Koreans, Tatars, and Gypsies.

At the heart of both the town and the novel stands the railway station—a source of income and influence, and a connection to the greater world beyond the town. Rich and picaresque, The Railway is full of color. Sophisticated yet with a naive delight in storytelling, it chronicles the dramatic changes felt throughout Central Asia in the early twentieth century.]]> 336 Hamid Ismailov 0099466139 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 3.21 2006 The Railway
author: Hamid Ismailov
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years]]> 366889 368 Chingiz Aitmatov 0253204828 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 4.38 1980 The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years
author: Chingiz Aitmatov
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> Jamilia 604208
Based on clues in the story, it takes place in northwestern Kyrgyzstan, presumably Talas Province. The story is backdropped against the collective farming culture which was early in its peak in that period.

Chingiz Aïtmatov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1928. His work appeared in over one hundred languages, and received numerous awards, including the Lenin Prize. He was the Kyrgyz ambassador to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO and the Benelux countries.

Translated by James Riordan.]]> 96 Chingiz Aitmatov 1846590329 Mandel 0 to-read, asian-meetup-list 3.95 1958 Jamilia
author: Chingiz Aitmatov
name: Mandel
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: to-read, asian-meetup-list
review:

]]> Melancholy I-II 61966680 Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild, feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig's mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in D�sseldorf, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady's daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig's fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann's apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter - a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness. Published here in one volume in English for the first time, Melancholy I-II is a major novel by 'the Beckett of the twenty-first century' (Le Monde).]]> 399 Jon Fosse 180427030X Mandel 0 contemporary, lit-24 4.01 1995 Melancholy I-II
author: Jon Fosse
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: contemporary, lit-24
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Agape Ethics: Moral Realism and Love for All Life]]> 34024117
" Agape Ethics will be warmly welcomed by theologians, ethicists, philosophers, and all who have ever longed for a theory of morality and ethics that would be inclusive of both human and nonhuman life. Scholars will be pleased with Greenway's endeavor to paint a compelling portrait of the way modern science, philosophy, and theology have diminished the moral realm of life by their complicity with what he calls 'scientism,' the claim that reality pertains only to that which science can explain. In short, Agape Ethics is a creative venture from beginning to end, and the beauty of its eloquence will sustain the interest of all who are seized by its inclusive moral appeal."
--Peter J. Paris, Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor Emeritus, Christian Social Ethics, Princeton Theological Seminary

"Inspired by Emmanuel Levinas's moral philosophy, Greenway presents a thoughtful and plausible case for a new agape ethics (based in finding oneself 'seized by the faces of others') as a constructive alternative to the ethical relativism of postmodernity, the ethical extremism of religious radicals, and the ethical foundationalism of modernity.With its richness in spiritual sensibility, public relevance, and ecological potency, Agape Ethics is an important achievement for Christian philosophical ethics."
--Hak Joon Lee, Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary

"Atour de forcein meta-ethics and philosophical spirituality. Agape Ethics extends Emmanuel Levinas's insights on responsibility to the Other to all animals and builds a compelling case foragapeas an irreducible moral-spiritual reality."
--Janet L. Parker, PhD, Senior Pastor, First Congregational United Church of Christ, Salem, Oregon

William Greenway is Professor of Philosophical Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is the author of For the Love of All The Story of Grace in Genesis (2015) and A Reasonable Why God and Faith Make Sense (2015).]]> 162 William Greenway 149820239X Mandel 4 4.50 Agape Ethics: Moral Realism and Love for All Life
author: William Greenway
name: Mandel
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/30
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[[The Book of Count Lucanor and Patronio: A Translation of Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor (Studies In Romance Languages)] [By: Manuel, Juan] [July, 2014]]]> 217024050 unknown author Mandel 0 0.0 [The Book of Count Lucanor and Patronio: A Translation of Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor (Studies In Romance Languages)] [By: Manuel, Juan] [July, 2014]
author: unknown author
name: Mandel
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read, medieval, frame-narrative-comps
review:

]]>