A lot has been said about this book and this writer: it was runner up for the NBA, and he's received a MacArthur grant and has been compared to Nabokov more times than Nabokov. So, I'm sorta just adding my voice to the choir: this is a really good novel. It combines an adventure story, a buddy novel, a historical fiction, and a potent reflection on immigration to the land of the allegedly free. The book flows from the project and ambition of it's narrator, Vladimir Brik: a Bosnian/American transplant who wants to write…
Read More
Angela Carter is one of the lesser known literary wonders. She's a sort of British, feminist Thomas Pynchon with a handy dab of Robert Coover mixed in. I've read a few of her short stories, but not until Nights at the Circus has her genius been so apparent to me. I'm now committed to reading everything she's written. Carter's "Nights" is a sort of hallucinogenic fairy-tale that takes us from London, through Petersburgh, and into the snowy depths…