Jim Ruland

Having realized that he prefers reading in the tub, the protagonist of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom decides to take up residence there, because, after all, “the bathroom was where I felt best.” This is a typical setup for the Belgian author of eight short but deliciously enigmatic novels: Toussaint puts......

“A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything.” Fans of the cult classic Repo Man will recognize these lines as the film’s leitmotif,......

This is the week of Bloomsday (June 16), the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is celebrated with scholarly symposia, cultural gatherings and an effusion of finger waving from academics who admonish us for not having enriched our meager minds with the master’s difficult but incandescent prose. Balderdash. This summer,......

Samantha Hunt's second book is a portmanteau of a novel. It's a love story. A father-daughter tale. A historical comedy of manners. A counterfactual autobiography of one of the world's greatest inventors. With time machines. Nina Subin The author (Click to enlarge) (Click to enlarge) Hunt's skillful yet slippery narrative......

The collection’s title story is a road novella that features a fatherless young Alabama boy of 14 named Henry Gill, whose catalog of miseries includes an overarching belief in God, a teenager’s raging lust, a bad haircut, worse acne, and a lump on his chest that, due to an overabundance......