LONDON STORIES

Name: LONDON STORIES
Author: Jerry White
ISBN: 978-0-375-71246-3

edited by Jerry White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2014

Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of...

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An award-winning historian curates this collection of 26 bits of fiction, essay and journalism about the denizens, grifters and debutantes of London Town.

White (History/Univ. of London; A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century, 2012, etc.), who spent the last two decades chronicling the history of London through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries over three volumes, has now produced a literary companion to the city. Unfortunately for casual readers, he's selected a curious, somewhat dispassionate, and largely homogenous collection of little-known essays, most of which are long past their copyright dates. The collection spans four decades, starting with dire depictions of London gripped in the black heart of the Great Plague, only to rise from the ashes of the Great Fire barely half a century later. Some stories show that London always has been and always will be a hard place, as Thomas De Quincey relates his relationship with a teenage prostitute in “Ann of Oxford Street” and Henry Mayhew relates his exchange with an 8-year-old sex worker in “Watercress Girl,” both unnerving images for any Londoner who has been hit with that awful query, “Business?” The classics are duly incorporated as well, with entries from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Graham Greene. Physician Frederick Treves makes for an interesting anomaly with his moving first-person remembrance of Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man.” Oddly, the second world war gets little coverage, mostly a nod from combat firefighter William Sansom in “The Wall.” Also, considering what a multicultural city London has become, the editor has selected few portraits of the city's current population. Dominican writer Jean Rhys deservedly earns an entry, as does Scottish novelist Muriel Spark and celebrated British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. But anyone expecting to find the likes of Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, or Zoe Heller will have to keep trudging down the high street.

Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of cuttings from Project Gutenberg and Google Books.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-375-71246-3

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Everyman’s Library

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.