Tao Lin is compared to the following authors on the back cover and in the review quotes filling up the first few pages of the book: Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Bret Easton Ellis – and I may have omitted some names from this list. If a writer is compared to authors like…

There are a couple of books which get better and better with each re-reading. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, or The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald are such books for me. And Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy is also such a book. This was the third time I…

Jennifer Egan’s novel was a dream of a book for me: it's full of those wonderful, clever and witty postmodern games I adore and which I hardly ever find in a book in such a succinct and mature form, but besides all the postmodern games and the tricky literary details, A Visit from the Goon…

Eva never wanted to be a mother. Until she reached the age of thirty-something, she lived quite happily as the manager of a thriving company: she spent five months abroad each year, conducted conveniently short affairs with foreign men and in the meantime constructed the picture of the ideal man…

This book started out as a magazine article written by Jon Krakauer in 1992 about the fate of Chris McCandless, a passionate, stubborn and extremely idealistic young man who strove to live life to the fullest. As a part of this, Chris entered into the wilds of Alaska in the spring of 1992 to…

I remember reading a very enthusiastic blog post about this novel sometime in the fall of 2009 which made me want to read Possession as soon as possible. However, the shop I used to order English-language books from didn’t have the novel in stock just then, so I ordered another novel by…

I guess I should quit reading the blurbs and especially the review quotes written on the front and back covers and the first or last couple of pages of English language novels. Although my naivity is almost unlimited and I always readily believe that the novel I’m about to read is a…

(The post may contain spoilers.) I’ve already read two other novels by Dennis Lehane and I’ve grown to like him. However, I liked both Shutter Island and Sacred in a negative kind of way: I didn’t like them because they were exceptional books, or because they completely renewed…

When I was at university, this book was one of the cult novels in my circle of friends. We read, reread and discussed it constantly, we analyzed its humour and philosophy all the time and the first sentence („In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.”) became a saying we quoted to each other on…

I happen to be a sucker for stories dealing with questions of real and virtual identities and the connections between reality and fiction, so when I read that Blueeyedboy is about a man who posts morbid entries on his blog and the story revolves around the fact that it’s not possible to…