Posts by Kevin Nguyen

  • Night Film, The Sound of Things Falling, Necessary Errors

    August Book Recommendations: Night Film, The Sound of Things Falling, and Necessary Errors

    Night Film by Marisha Pessl Ashley, the 24-year-old daughter of cult horror director Stanislas Cordova, is found dead in a warehouse in Manhattan. (I don’t know my cult horror directors very well, but I kept imagining Dario and Asia Argento.) When the police rule the death a suicide, investigative journalist Scott McGrath takes it upon […]

  • 'The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.', 'Tampa', and 'Don't Kiss Me'

    July Book Recommendations: The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Tampa, and Don’t Kiss Me

    The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., by Adelle Waldman I’ll describe this book and you’ll think, A book about Brooklyn hipsters. Fucking Brooklyn hipsters. And you’d be right. That’s entirely the point of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Adelle Waldman has set out to answer an age-old question: Why are men jerks, and why […]

  • Idiopathy, Evil and the Mask, and The Shining Girls

    June Book Recommendations: Idiopathy, Evil and the Mask, and The Shining Girls

    Idiopathy, by Sam Byers According to the epigraph, idiopathy is a “disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown.” For the three central characters of the book, the conditions could be loneliness, uncertainty, or love. But the more literal connection in Sam Byers’s debut novel is a bizarre epidemic affecting […]

  • May Book Recommendations: The Woman Upstairs, Who Owns the Future?, and Transit

    The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud I recently watched the first season of Justified, and the pilot episode ends with U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens asking his ex-wife if he’s an angry man. She turns to Raylan and says that he’s the angriest man she has ever known. I kept thinking about this line throughout The Woman […]

  • April Book Recommendations: Life After Life, You, and x

    Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson Ursula Todd has many pasts and many futures. Every time she dies, Ursula starts back at the beginning of her life, able to proceed differently the next time (think Groundhog Day meets The Butterfly Effect). Atkinson doesn’t spend much time dwelling on the whys of the cosmic trappings of […]

  • March Book Recommendations: Wave, The Still Point of the Turning World, and Donnybrook

    Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala Wave opens immediately as the tsunami hits on Boxing Day in 2004. Sonali Deraniyagala is with her family, vacationing in Yala, a park on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka. From their hotel room, Deraniyagala can see the wave approaching, and, from a distant, it seems like nothing. “It didn’t seem […]

  • February Book Recommendations: Wise Men, Give Me Everything You Have, and Vampires in the Lemon Grove

    Wise Men by Stuart Nadler A friend recently told me that I didn’t recommend enough novels in this column, which I thought was a little crazy, because the majority of my suggestions skew heavily toward fiction. “No,” he said, “I want to read a NOVEL.” I told him saying “novel” more loudly didn’t really clarify […]

  • January Book Recommendations: The Reenactments, The Disaster Diaries, and Drinking With Men

    The Reenactments by Nick Flynn My favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel is Timequake, in which a cosmic ripple forces everyone on Earth to relive the past decade of their lives but are unable to change any of their actions. It’s part Vonnegut autobiography, part exploration of determinism: People re-experience their greatest mistakes and the death of […]

  • Overlooked Books of 2012: The Fault in Our Stars, People Who Eat Darkness, and More

    For our final Books of the Month feature of 2012, we’ll be spotlighting some notable releases we may have missed this year. Threats, by Amelia Gray Threats bears a lot of similarities to Gillian Flynn’s surprise blockbuster thriller Gone Girl (which I’d also recommended — and am about to spoil, slightly). Both are about husbands […]

  • November Book Recommendations: Sweet Tooth, Detroit City Is the Place to Be, and Days of Blood and Starlight

    Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan Espionage, betrayal, scandal — only Ian McEwan could put these things in a novel and make them kind of slow. But Sweet Tooth, the author’s 14th book, is a pensive, literary spy novel. I should clarify: It features spies talking about literature during the Cold War. “Sweet Tooth” is the […]

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