Short and Wicked
By Lauren Groff
Short and Wicked
By Lauren Groff
Sometimes, you want to sink into an enormous book, sometimes you want something as swift and sharp as a knife. These are some of my favourite short and wicked books:
Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson
£15.00 £14.25Carson is one of my favorite living writers. Her brain is vast, the connections she makes between ideas balletic. This book broke me the first time I read it, and I keep finding new riches in it every time I return to it.
Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor
£12.99 £12.34What a wild, witchy, galloping ride this book is, by a very young Mexican writer. I've read it twice now and marvel at how Melchor pulls this novel off.
By Night in Chile
Roberto Bolano
£9.99I've been on a Bolano kick recently, and though 2666 is majestic, vast, devastating, this slim novella delivers a powerful punch to the solar plexus. Bolano's great genius is the way he makes the reader complicit with the undercurrent of evil in his books.
Train Dreams
Denis Johnson
£9.99 £9.49This book is a fever dream, stunning and strange, both mythology of the American West and a needle puncturing that same mythology.
Territory of Light
Yuko Tsushima
£8.99 £8.54I was lucky to have written the foreword to Tsushima's forthcoming reissue of A Woman Running In The Mountains (NYRB Classics), and in the process, read all of her work available in English. This is a book made of planes of light and dreams, about a year in the life of a struggling single mother. It is itself a prism.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke
£9.99 £9.49Rilke is better known for his angels and letters, but this is my favorite of his work, a dreamy, pungent, haunted modernist delight.
Bear
Marian Engel
£9.99 £9.49Do you want to read a book about a woman falling in love with an actual bear? Of course you do. It's exquisite and hilarious.
Mrs Caliban (Faber Editions): 'Wonderful' (Margaret Atwood)
Rachel Ingalls
£9.99 £9.49Speaking of hilarious love stories between human women and creatures, this is one of the greatest, a woman falling in love with a sea monster. All of Rachel Ingalls's work simmers with barely repressed hysteria.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Bohumil Hrabal
£8.99 £8.54Written in a rushing, eddying single flow of words, this book is randy and hilarious. It probably should be read in a single glorious sitting.