Tweets on recent reading
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Beautiful wordplay, an engaging, slightly off-kilter structure. I’ve fallen hard for Arthur Less—the handsome, gay Everyman with his bumbling insecurities, his lovers galore. Better yet, I want to be him. He doesn’t, particularly, but I’ll gladly take the job!
The World and All It Holds by Aleksander Hemon
Immersive. Epic sweep—historical and geographic—artful wordcraft, indelible characters. A tale of an unexpected family with gay love at its center. Please make this into a movie!
McSweeneys 69
Fantastic and fantastical new prose by Lydia Conklin, Siqi Liu, John Lee Clark, Julie Hecht, Fernanda Melchor and more.
Spare by Prince Harry
Don’t hate me, but I read and quite enjoyed this. Not all that contentious, really. The snippets related in the press make him out to be a bomb-thrower. When taken in context, these incidents read for the most part as nuance commentary. The loss of his mother is a deep sadness that runs throughout the book.
Stray Dogs by Rawi Hage
This story collection, is beautifully written, but its main concerns are intellectual. I need to be moved by my reading, and so failed to be taken by them.
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Dreamlike, poetic, magical, its secrets at time well hidden—like Lila herself. As someone who in my own way also grew up rough, who has loved an old man and lost him, this book devastated me.
Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
I’m late to the party on this—such beautiful sentences. Incredibly sexy—you rarely get work this hot in literary fiction, that turns you on and makes your heart ache. Leaves you wanting more—life, love, literature, art.