Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro My rating: 5 of 5 stars Never Let Me Go is a contemporary realist novel about a friendship and eventual love triangle among … Continue reading
A Note on Blade Runner 2049
[I posted this to Tumblr a few days ago and didn’t post it here because it doesn’t quite meet the more essay-like standards I’d prefer to maintain on this site. … Continue reading
Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Laureate: Notes Toward an Introduction
Last night I dreamed I woke up this morning to find that the Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to a little-known English poet named Thomas Plum. I’d never … Continue reading
In Defense of Pevear and Volokhonsky
Janet Malcolm contributes the latest polemic against Richard Pevear and Linda Volokhonsky (hereafter P&V), the famed husband-and-wife translators of the Russian classics, whose preeminence in their field is now being … Continue reading
Poetry, Product, and the Novel: A Few Notes on Mark de Silva’s “Distant Visions”
Mark de Silva has written a superb polemic essay against the state of the literary novel in our time: “Distant Visions: Putdownable Prose and the State of the Art-Novel.” In it, … Continue reading
Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro My rating: 5 of 5 stars (Spoilers below.) It’s admittedly been quite a while since I read The Remains of the Day, … Continue reading
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro My rating: 5 of 5 stars Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the few living Anglophone writers I’d bet the proverbial farm on. If literature … Continue reading
An Artist of the Floating World: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Aestheticism
Kazuo Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), is narrated retrospectively, from the post-war vantage of 1948-50, by the painter, Masuji Ono. Ono’s ambition caused him first … Continue reading
Penitential Realism?
It’s been almost fourteen years since James Wood warned us about “hysterical realism,” presumably the major novelistic mode of the late twentieth century. According to Wood, it is a mode … Continue reading
