When people ask what I've been up to lately, I say, "Not much, just lounging in my new Snuggie and reading Amber Sparks' The Unfinished World."
Amber's book of short stories, which the Washington Post called a "masterful work of speculative fiction," came out January 25th, 2016.
Daniel Johnson at The Paris Review wrote: "Every scene is, almost always, softly and meticulously arranged, like tableaux of preserved butterflies. And yet, as real as these characters are, everything about The Unfinished World remains somehow fantastic, dreamed up in Sparks’s own terror of an imagination—like the librarian who’s dedicated her life to studying and archiving human fevers."
And here are some other books that were born as recently as today:
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith: "There is a primal side in each of us, one that disrespects social norms, has needs, makes demands. In her remarkable novel, The Vegetarian, South Korean writer Han Kang explores the irreconcilable conflict between our two selves: one greedy, primitive; the other accountable to family and society." -Words Without Borders
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel: "We’re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider – the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world…[Martel's] semi-surreal, semi-absurdist mode is well suited to exploring the paradox. The moral and spiritual implications of his tale have, in the end, a quality of haunting tenderness." -Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian
Oh...and happy Groundhog Day!
