One-sentence review: languorous, mysterious and evocative with a dark twist. Slightly longer review: A young woman uncertain of herself is in a coastal Spanish town so she can take her cranky hypochondriac mother to a specialist who might be a crank himself. In some ways this is a coming-of-age novel, as Sofia falls in love with […]

One-sentence review: A caustic tale of modern life, with its alienation, bad friends and dreams of self improvement.   Slightly longer review: As children, we often think books ought to be about larger than life characters: adventurers, royalty, vampires and magicians.  Yet when we’re older and our dreams of becoming rock stars, professional athletes or Hollywood

Far before J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, there was an author writing about young misfits with flair and passion: John Fante. In the 1930s Fante began a series of novels starring Arturo Bandini, a delusional, obnoxious, socially incompetent and penniless wannabe writer who is, I am afraid to say,

One sentence review: the most beautifully written, moving and yet sweetly humorous collection of short stories I can remember reading. Slightly longer review:  I’ve recently read two collections of short stories by authors championed by Black Sparrow Press: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin and The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski. On a superficial level there

One sentence review: Witty. Moving. Enveloped me whole. I adored this novel. Slightly longer review: I didn’t expect to like this. The plot seemed cliched: a celebrity who falls for a norm. As with most celeb meets norm stories (think Notting Hill), the celeb walks into the norm’s workplace (in this case a New York