Tag Archives: Metafiction

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

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Synopsis:
A young man with severe amnesia comes to realize that he is being stalked by a conceptual shark (which is much, much scarier than you might think).

Review:
What surprised me most about The Raw Shark Texts was how fast it moved. For all its high-minded metaphysical aims and experimental underpinnings, the book has the pacing of an airport thriller or Stephen King horror book. There were some sequences in this book, such as protagonist Second Eric’s Sanderson encounter with Nobody, that were are frightening as anything I’ve ever read. Continue reading →

Grub by Elise Blackwell

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Synopsis:
The trials and travails of a group of young New York City-based novelists.

Review:
Grub is a reworking of a 19th Century novel. I can’t speak to its success in that regard because I haven’t read the original, but I will say that author Elise Blackwell pulls off a rare bird: a satire brimming with humanism. I enjoyed every line of this book, which reminded me at times of Whit Stillman’s marvelous first feature Metropolitan. This is a galley I’ll be keeping, rereading, and recommending all over the place when the book comes out in stores in September.

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

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Synopsis:
A ne’er-do-well goes to Prague to work for his cousin, who’s turning an old castle into a retreat-style hotel, but the castle is holding secrets, not to mention the fact that this story’s being written by a prison inmate with a crush on his writing teacher. Continue reading →