Abstract: A critical review of The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. Admittedly, I don’t normally go for this sort of book, call it pseudo-up-market-chick-lit, or women’s-lit or thank-god-it’s-not-me-pity-lit or bad-lit, whatever genre the market forces have currently glommed on for this type of fiction. But, I was…

Imagine a work of fiction that nods to Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Now imagine the through-line theme of the novel taking to heart Haraway’s statement that “the cyborg [operates] as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality.” Combine this with child/teen glam-pageants and it sounds like a recipe…

This is my first book of Knausgaard and the honest reviews say this book is a disappointment compared to his others in the My Struggle series. Maybe the problem was I wasn’t stinking drunk when I read it and maybe one needs to be stinking drunk to appreciate his aesthetic. …

Some say the world will end in fire. Some say ice. Robert Frost in the poem appearing in Harper’s Magazine in 1920. It’s wonderful to see many works of science fiction being reprinted these days and in the broadest sense, The Black Cloud is one of them. Numerous scientists discover…

People are frequently confused about exhibition venues for art in that they think they are all the same. They are not. Exhibition venues with my biased recommendations. Red — Avoid Yellow — Exercise caution Green — Exhibit

Day, I mean page, 1. I keep this journal as a record of my reading Annihilation so that those who consider plunging into this novel, meaning word-smear, will be forewarned and perhaps learn from my error. …

In an early review of Rabbit, Run David Boroff of The New York Times wrote, “The author’s style is particularly impressive; artful and supple, its brilliance is belied by its relaxed rhythms. Mr. Updike has a knack of tilting his observations just a little, so that even a commonplace phrase…

On some website Jonathan Franzen says two of his favorite books are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Desperate Characters by Paula Fox (1970). Franzen’s novel Freedom has a couple references to Gatsby and Franzen’s last chapter begins with the rumored death of a cat, recall that Fox’s book starts with…

Norman Rockwell’s illustration Beyond the Easel (BTE) is a strange image. First it is a portrait of the artist as an old man, and as a scout dignitary or leader. From what I read, Rockwell was never a member of the Boy Scouts, (I can’t make sense of the writing…