Blog
Today brings the first of the counterfactual matchups in my commentary since Hannah Pearl Utt inexplicably chose Liars to advance from the play-in round. So let me talk about The Book of George. This book hits a lot of the same sort of notes that Liars does from a hapless man failing at relationships. But unlike Liars, the focus […]
Today’s pair of novels is another wildly disparate pairing. Danzy Senna’s Colored Television is a realist portrayal of a novelist and low-ranking academic tempted into television writing, albeit on spec with a producer of dubious motivation. The sole bit of surrealism is when Senna and her family move into a retirement home towards the end of […]
Before it won the Booker, I was largely unaware of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital but I picked it up not too long after it won curious to see what this book was that the Booker judges felt was better than James. I had kind of expected the title to refer to freeways as I’ve generally heard the word […]
Today’s matchup includes a pair of very disparate books. Vinson Cunningham, a former Obama campaign worker turned New Yorker staff writer, wrote a novel that’s about his time on the Obama campaign without ever explicitly naming Obama or any of the other major figures in the campaign. Giving it the title Great Expectations certainly did nothing to […]
Today’s matchup is a pair of debuts. Kaveh Akbar is a well-known poet making his debut as a novelist while Tony Tulathimutte whose story, “The feminist,” brought him some notoriety makes his book-length debut with a collection of linked stories. Both books caught my attention before this year’s Tournament of Books (I’m apparently becoming increasingly […]
Today’s matchup sees the debut novel from Kelly Link who’s been publishing short fiction for years against a novel in stories by Rita Bullwinkel, the current fiction editor of McSweeney’s. Headshot has gotten a lot of love and after a couple of podcast interviews, this book fell on my radar even before the Tournament of Books. […]
The first “regular” match of the tournament also feels like an unfair match-up. On the one side, we have a small-feeling book, The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a new name to me), on the other side we have the goliath, Percival Everett’s major publisher (how did this take so long?) debut coming on […]
This year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at […]
So February started strong, which was nice but life can be a real jerk and between a bit of a slowdown mid-month combined with a minor disaster, I kind of stalled out. Minor disaster you say? These used to match: Why yes, I tripped and fell, landing hard on my hands, and, as it turned […]