literary fiction Archives - Andrew Blackman

Reading

What Is Literary Fiction Anyway?

Literary fiction is hard to define, but I'm going to try anyway. The debate tends to be poisoned by debates about elitism and being "better" than genre fiction, which I'd like to avoid here. Instead, I want to identify the…

Reading

Borges Marathon, Part 17: The Garden of Forking Paths

A pacy wartime thriller mixes with an abstract meditation on the forking paths of time and fate in a classic short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

Reading

Borges Marathon, Part 16: The Library of Babel

An infinite library of every possible book sounds wonderful until you contemplate the realities of it, which Jorge Luis Borges does masterfully in "The Library of Babel".

Reading

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Why was I disappointed by a novel that everyone else seems to love? Follow me as I try to find the answers.

Reading

Review: 912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy

A Malaysian debut novelist combines a contemporary love story with a historical narrative of Japanese occupation. I enjoyed one much more than the other, but would recommend it nonetheless.

Reading

Borges Marathon, Part 14: The Lottery in Babylon

How do you explain the effects of random chance? Borges invented an all-powerful Lottery governing all possible events in life to help us think through it.

Reading

The Echoes by Evie Wyld: Review

My review of a beautifully dark and thought-provoking new piece of literary fiction by Evie Wyld, set between a remote Australian outback village haunted by terrible memories and a London flat inhabited by a disgruntled ghost.

Reading

The Future by Naomi Alderman

What kind of future do we want? How would it look if it was based on trust instead of fear? For a novel that starts with the end of the world, The Future has a lot of interesting things to…

Reading

Borges Marathon, Part 13: The Circular Ruins

What happens when one man tries to dream another into existence? Jorge Luis Borges imagines this scenario in this thought-provoking story.