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Posts by Tyler F

Party girl, intellectual, recluse

Cover of Sex and Rage: Advice to Yo
A review of Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time by Eve Babitz

Eve Babitz is a woman who will not be pigeonholed. A fixture of the 1970s Los Angeles scene, she was an infamous party girl and muse. She was also an intellectual, artist, journalist, and novelist, whose talent was often overshadowed by her buxom stature and a hedonistic appetite for men, booze, and food. Now an elderly recluse, Babitz is receiving a righteous rediscovering, with a steady reissuing of her works over the last few years.

Aug 3, 2022

Buddha and bharal

Cover of The Snow Leopard
A review of The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen’s melancholic and metaphor-laden Himalayan travelogue, a true story, is an essential, definitional work of 1970s American literature. It is also one of my favorite books of all time.

Nov 11, 2021

Love, loss, and kimchi

Cover of Crying in H Mart
A review of Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that Michelle Zauner, a musician who goes by Japanese Breakfast, has an interest in food. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It might however be a surprise that Zauner has written such a thoroughly lovely and reflective memoir, called Crying in H Mart, that celebrates Korean food among the sometimes strained bonds of family and cultural identity, in light of her mother’s unexpected cancer death.

Jun 10, 2021

Chirli and me

Cover of The Bitch
A review of The Bitch by Pilar Quintana

If you have ever wondered what a gritty and meanly funny version of Marley and Me would look like, Pilar Quintana’s The Bitch has you covered. It is the story of Damaris, who gets a dog. Damaris lives with husband Rogelio on a Colombian hillside, surviving off fishing and keeping house for absentee homeowners. Wife and husband long for a baby that will never come.

May 3, 2021

Season of the witch

Cover of Hurricane Season
A review of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophia Hughes

Hurricane Season, a novel about the unexplained murder of a "witch” in a bottomed-out Mexican village, as told by several unreliable narrators, does not have paragraphs. If this is a deal breaker, move it along. Author Fernanda Melchor did not come to coddle, she came to slay.

Dec 30, 2020

Hillbilly, French twist

Cover of The End of Eddy
A review of The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis

Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy is a brisk and brutal roman à clef about a white gay teen growing up in rural 1990s France. Alcoholism, racism, violence, and impugnable choices abound. Gross and upsetting things happen in riveting ways. Yet its ending is oddly uplifting. A bestseller in France, its young author is now regularly called upon by popular media to explain the advent of French populism and the alleged moral stagnation of France’s white underclass.

Dec 15, 2020

Manga man with talent

Cover of The Man Without Talent
A review of The Man Without Talent by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmsberg

One of my favorite things lately is Japanese cartoonist Yoshiharu Tsuge.

Active from the 1960s-1980s, Tsuge has had a lasting influence on Japanese culture. Among other accomplishments, he helped pioneer manga’s “I-comics” genre, creating fiction out of his personal life, domestic strife and declining mental health included. Big in Japan for decades, Tsuge is finally getting an American roll-out.

Jul 16, 2020

Gertrude and Alice redrawn

Cover of The Authobiography of Alic
A review of The Authobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein and illustrated by Maira Kalman

I absolutely love Maira Kalman’s artwork. Colorful and sweet with an endearing naivete, her work is like a cotton-candy version of a better life but with melancholic undertones. I love it and I want to live in it. So when I heard Kalman had illustrated one of my favorite books, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I was thrilled. This is the crossover event of 2020 as far as I’m concerned.

Jun 18, 2020

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