Word: novels
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...Japanese mystery writers to be translated into English. Their lurid fiction is anchored in ostensibly mundane domestic affairs - far cries from the hard-boiled yakuza netherworld of conventional Japanese crime fiction, where women mostly inhabit peripheral positions as prostitutes or femmes fatales. Like Natsuo Kirino, whose best-selling 1997 novel Out chronicles a band of disaffected middle-aged bento-box factory workers who moonlight as murderesses, Nonami places women at the center of her work. As the author of some 50 books, she is more prolific than Kirino, although only one previous work has been translated into English. That...
...permanently mad.”And the plot is far and away the work’s least compelling feature. Certainly, had Kennedy handled her plot with any less dexterity, Day’s perception of place and time as fluid rather than fixed would have dragged the novel into disconnected stasis. And it is a feat that Kennedy manages to portray the human mind with (most of) its disorder and associative tendencies, and still drag a story out of it—though, at times, Kennedy exposes her narrative manipulations, clustering beloved ones’ deaths suspiciously close together...
...sneak a peek at the next book on the syllabus, which I thought to be far more satisfying: “The Scarlet Pimpernel.”Luckily, my bad experience with “The Odyssey” hasn’t prejudiced me against all the novels with a Homerian essence. Before I was halfway through Bernhard Schlink’s “Homecoming,” I had decided that it was time to return to the original hero’s journey.But what makes “Homecoming” such a compelling read...
...minor to major as it moves to a multilayered climax. “Whose Authority,” the second song on “Lucky,” sounds good at first, but gets repetitive by the second chorus. While Nada Surf usually uses their guitar tones in novel ways, the three minutes of steady pseudo-country on “Whose Authority” portend the monotony to come. The third track happens to be the high point of the album. “Beautiful Beat” is a sunny-day anthem layered with an acoustic center...
...identifying a novel potential target for treatment, Harvard scientists may have brought us one step closer to finding a vaccine...