Today on the blog, Bookseller and Autumn-Season-Lover Gina shares her list of must-haves from BookPeople for the incoming season. Watching the color scheme change from Summer to Autumn as I scrolled through social media at the end of August was startling and welcomed. Maybe I’m biased because my birthday is in the fall, but as … Continue reading Welcome Autumn: Fall Favorites for the Spooky Season
Tag: Magical Realism
The Magical Realism of Tea Obreht
Spurred by her recent appearance in the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 anthology, and a general buzz among my co-workers, I picked up an advanced copy of Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife. I finally finished it late last night, purposefully reading slower as the last pages approached and the back half of the book grew thinner and thinner. I turned off the lamp and just sat in the dark, thinking about it, re-working each plot point and trying to remember the last time a book really got at me so intensely.
The Tiger's Wife is the finest work of magical realism I have read since I greedily poured over Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school. Like Marquez, Obreht packs an embarrassment of riches into her work. Each chapter of the book is like a Russian nesting doll, revealing smaller and more wondrous stories, each character contains multitudes. Esoterica abounds, and every flashback is full of old-world mysticism and ancient rites largely forgotten in our modern times.
Top Shelf for March 2009
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry Diving into a really good debut novel is one of my favorite experiences as a reader. Sure, there's excitement when a tried and true favorite puts out the novel he's been working on for years, but there's an unparalleled feeling of discovery when you realize that a person … Continue reading Top Shelf for March 2009