The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Bogotá39-author Guadalupe Nettel's debut-in-English collection, Natural Histories.
(It's a perfectly fine, even good book, but I find yet again that the appeal of the short story form remains very limited to me. I have few genre-issues -- I'll read most anything (though maybe romance novels could put that to the test) -- but as far as form goes, I'm all long, long form. I can appreciate a well-turned story (Borges, Ozick, Monterroso, Krzhizhanovsky, Lydia Davis etc. etc. ...) or collection, but novels remain what feels like infinitely more satisfying. Give me a choice and I'll pick the novel over the story/collection ninety-nine times out of a hundred. A story in a magazine ? I almost never bother, even if it's an author I otherwise greatly admire.
I really should look into the reasons for that at some point; it's certainly central to how I 'see' (and hence review) books.)
(It's a perfectly fine, even good book, but I find yet again that the appeal of the short story form remains very limited to me. I have few genre-issues -- I'll read most anything (though maybe romance novels could put that to the test) -- but as far as form goes, I'm all long, long form. I can appreciate a well-turned story (Borges, Ozick, Monterroso, Krzhizhanovsky, Lydia Davis etc. etc. ...) or collection, but novels remain what feels like infinitely more satisfying. Give me a choice and I'll pick the novel over the story/collection ninety-nine times out of a hundred. A story in a magazine ? I almost never bother, even if it's an author I otherwise greatly admire.
I really should look into the reasons for that at some point; it's certainly central to how I 'see' (and hence review) books.)