Here is a collection of over twenty stories so complete in their style, message, and observations that they immediately impress, carving out little pits in the psyche that make you question how much of life you are letting slip by. Almost poems, almost, at times, koans, they are almost always beautiful, unsettling, and full of longing. Many layered, tightly-wound pleasures, we are allowed to roam inside these phrases and constructions to experience their  feeling(s) and world(s): scenes of a future and past similar to our own but pushed to enigmatic corners, impassive reports of strange sights.

My goal with this website is simple: to write about interesting books or texts and hopefully provide guidance to you, the reader, with, at times, in-depth analysis and explication. The main thing for me is to provide human curation in what is quickly becoming an AI auto-generated, confirmation biased landscape. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it limits what works are talked about, often serving recency bias, leaving great, older works to wither despite having much to offer.

Let’s get the hook out of the way: this is one of the greatest long-form American novels. That it was written by a woman in the 1960s (initially published in 1965) and languished in publication purgatory for decades makes it all the more remarkable because it has since developed a cult status, given new life (in 2024) by the excellent Dalkey Archive Press. This is not to historicize, rather to give a brief contextual overview.

Every time that we read, we create a specific moment, an experience that is immediate, forcing us to take in that which is directly in front of us, made up of all things from our past, allowing for interpretation while also being anticipatory, where we theorize about what is ahead and start to desire certain outcomes. Each session is different from the one before. This compounds as we read further and rely on our memory of what we’ve read, so that our understanding of the object in front of us is interpretive at best, made up of our past, present, and future desire, our memory and its problematic retellings. Which is all to say that this review is going to be imprecise and inaccurate, this first paragraph inspired by the final part of Animal Money and the ideas it presents, which, along with its surreal, sci-fi mystery backdrop might just be the maximalist beach read (if such a thing exists) that you’ve been looking for.

With her work largely forgotten or overlooked for 90 years, it is time we shift our gaze to Butts. Almost immediately in The Taverner Novels, Butts establishes an off-kilter feeling. She begins by describing the setting/landscape, and after a few pages you no longer trust the trees, the wind, or the ocean. There is something strange at work, as a group of people (brother and sister (Scylla and Felix), friends (Clarence, Boris, Ross), lovers (Picus), and an outsider (Carston)) gather together in this remote house in rural England, but the eeriness is balanced by beauty, and this pendulum is what drives the author’s style (e.g., “Like open fir-cones dipped in fire and cream, the thunder-clouds were piling up the sky. Mounting the hills, a wing of them rising out of the sea. Inshore, a breath of wind clashed the pine needles.” (37)).

What makes this book interesting is the way Lowry can put you in the middle of the action so immediately and intimately, the style characteristically his own. This is also what I loved about

Under the Volcano

Oedipus

We all know someone who is a great storyteller. Someone who can spin a yarn with the perfect amount of detail and humor and sexiness to keep your full attention, someone who has the natural gift. They’re letting it all flow through. That’s what it feels like to read this book. It’s like sitting with that friend who is damned good at telling stories, drinking a bunch of beers or wine, and talking shit about your hometown while ultimately loving it (and including enough nostalgia to make it resonate).

There’s so much here: so much language, so many ideas and concepts, so many tough questions, so many terrible and beautiful images. Like all great books, it cannot truly be talked about. There’s an essence that cannot be summarized or reviewed or put into smaller form. No, it must be read and internalized and brought to bear by the reader. I greatly admire these works because I think they are what literature needs to move forward. I also think it’s fair to criticize them, and, at times, The Tunnel feels overworked. Yet, it also regularly made me think about what it was trying to say to the point where I found myself discussing various arguments and ideas from it in the real world. Few works end up leaping into my conversations beyond surface discussions, so there’s a lot to recommend from that fact alone. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this book never quite gets out of first gear, making the entire thing a bit of a slog, rarely slipping into those transcendent moments where language and imagery carry you away so that you’re bowled over by an expected phrase. As though something which has lost the initial inertia or spark, it truly is a tunnel carved one shovelful at a time, reinforced the whole way – functional and structurally solid as hell, festooned to the point of nothingness, which, with its focus on disappointment and void, may be the entire point: “BEING. Holy word. Being cannot be recognized unless it succeeds in Seeming.” (75)

The witch is dead, murdered, left to rot in a drainage ditch. Who killed her and why? These questions initially drive the narrative, though it’s not long before we learn the answers. Yet, the question of why lingers and becomes the nucleus of what follows.