Archive for the ‘Allegory/Fable’ Category

LADIES’ MAN by Richard Price

Crude and hilarious, LADIES’ MAN from American author and screenwriter, Richard Price is a week in the life of Kenny Becker, a thirty-year-old college dropout who works as door-to-door salesman selling crappy cheap gadgets. It’s the 1970s, and Kenny lives in New York with his girlfriend, “bank clerk would-be singer” La Donna, a good-looking, marginally talented girl whose big night revolves around a cheesy talent contest at a hole- in-the-wall club called Fantasia. Kenny has a series of failed relationships in his past, and when the book begins, La Donna’s singing lessons, according to Kenny, appear to be placing a strain on the couple.

August 11, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Allegory/Fable, Character Driven, Debut Novel, Drift-of-Life, New Orleans

AND YET THEY WERE HAPPY by Helen Phillips

Like a fairy tale, way (way) back in the day when you could still be enchanted, and yet they were happy makes you feel giddy and haunted at the same time. I found myself blinking a lot while reading, as if I couldn’t quite believe what my mind was seeing. Slowly, I realized: I believe.

August 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Allegory/Fable, Award Winning Author, Experimental Fiction, Short Stories, Unique Narrative

CENTURIES OF JUNE by Keith Donohue

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue is a modern fable revolving around American myths and Hindu concepts of reincarnation. The protagonist is a man who awakens to find himself with a hole in the back of his head and no idea of who he is or who the eight nude women sleeping in his bed might be. An elderly figure who he believes is the ghost of Samuel Beckett helps him into the bathroom and then saves his life from each woman as they attack him in historical order of when they were wronged by him in his past lives.

May 31, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Life Choices, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Unique Narrative

GALORE by Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey opens his new novel with Judah, sitting in a “makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days.” Only Mary Tryphena Devine comes near him these days, urging him to take a little food – or, if he doesn’t want to eat – to just die. Judah’s story is the primary, yet not the only otherworldly theme that glides through this multigenerational family saga, touching everybody in its wake. The novel is set in one of Newfoundland’s wild and rough eastern coastal regions, and, more specifically, in two remote fishing villages, Paradise Deep and The Gut.

April 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Award Winning Author, Canada, Commonwealth Prize, Facing History, Magical Realism, Small Town, Speculative (Beyond Reality), World Literature

SUDDENLY IN THE DEPTHS OF THE FOREST by Amos Oz

Any writer who can so completely capture the essence of cowness, even in translation (here by Sondra Silverston) is most certainly worth reading, and I am entirely pleased to make the acquaintance of Israeli novelist Amos Oz. Never mind that this airy little story of 2005, which the author describes as “A fable for all ages,” is almost certainly merely a footnote to Oz’s work, barely reflecting what I understand to be the seriousness of his major work, let alone the outspoken commitment of his political writings. It is still a story worth reading once for its charm and twice for its meaning.

March 21, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Speculative (Beyond Reality), World Literature

THE TIGER’S WIFE by Tea Obreht

This spectacular debut novel by the talented Téa Obreht, is narrated mostly through the voice of young Natalia Stefanovi. Shortly after the novel opens, we learn that Natalia has followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and studied medicine. Just recently done with medical school, she has taken on a volunteer assignment to inoculate children in an orphanage in a small seaside village called Brejevina. The book is set in a war-ravaged country in the Balkans, quite possibly Obreht’s native Croatia. Brejevina, Natalia explains, “is forty kilometers east of the new border.”

March 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Allegory/Fable, Balkans, Debut Novel, Losses, Magical Realism, War