​I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken is a collection of poems in which the speaker documents his stroke, his time in the hospital, and his reflections on family and life. The language is sharp and cutting, and because they’re all prose poems, it is the language that holds each one up. There were so many poems I was affected by that I would just be listing off the table of contents if I were to say which ones I liked. However, there was one poem that I reread because of how piercing it is. This poem is, ‘Redshift’, in which the speaker describes a house being on fire for six years, and a man beating his wife, “…all night, the same night…” It highlights how trauma can be unseen, its recurrence, and that no matter where you stand, there will always be pain somewhere. In one of my favorite lines of the collection, the speaker observes, “When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and / everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history.” What exists consumes and what consumes cannot be avoided. The collection is deeply haunting in how the speaker is frank about his family, his past lovers, and the stroke that invariably changed his world. An essential read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection about a man and the loss of his lover to AIDs, how it felt to be queer in the 90s, and the violence tied to those moments. The language is piercing, volatile, and propulsive in a way that physically plays out through the line breaks and white spaces. The language too, with the recurrence of blood and death, creates a sense of foreboding that blankets the whole collection. I was particularly drawn to poems such as, ‘Scheherazade’, ‘Visible World’, ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’, and ‘Straw House, Straw Dog’. This violence that is tied to homophobia is so intensely described in ‘A Primer for the Small Weird Loves’ in which a boy confesses his love to another boy and is then nearly drowned, kickstarting a life of hookups and lovers where both people force violence onto each other. The speaker says, “You try to warn him, you tell him/you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,” and, “You take the things you love/and tear them apart/or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours.” There’s a softness too that the speaker allows the reader to see for just a brief moment. At the end of the poem ‘You are Jeff”, the speaker’s lover reaches over and touches his hand while driving and the speaker says, “and you feel your/heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you/don’t even have a name for.” This in part relating back to the poem obsessing over names provides a grandiosity to the whole collection. I can see why this collection has withstood the test of time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Wild Palms by William Faulkner is a novel comprised of two completely separate narratives, ‘The Wild Palms’ and ‘The Old Man’, which are spliced together after each chapter.
 
‘The Wild Palms’ follows a man who becomes wooed by a married woman, and they form a plot to leave the town and be together. The woman, Charlotte, directs and desires this move, first going to a hotel with the man, Harry. When they form the plan, they don’t have the money to execute a disappearance. Suddenly, Harry finds a wallet with the money, phones Charlotte, where they decide to get train tickets out of New Orleans to Chicago. On the ride, Charlotte’s husband joins them where he allows Harry to take Charlotte away from him, but that he'll keep an eye on her. After this, both Charlotte and Harry think the money will last them awhile, with Harry taking on a job at a hospital and Charlotte selling her puppets. But things turn sour, and their money runs out so they hop from place to place trying to survive. First to a cabin where a friend stocks them food, then to a worker’s camp in the winter, and finally to Florida. However, during the worker’s camp in Utah, they meet another couple and live with them, where eventually the woman asks Harry to perform an abortion on her. When he finally does, Charlotte forgets her cleaning items in the cold, and so learns that she too has become pregnant. It’s only when they hear back from the woman, does Charlotte ask for Harry to perform an abortion on her. Harry freaks out, and at first tries to do anything to stop the pregnancy, going so far as pleading a brothel for their abortion medicine. Eventually, after Charlotte’s pleading, he performs the abortion, but it goes awry. They get out of Utah, and travel to Florida where Charlotte is suffering at a hotel owned by another doctor. One night, when Charlotte becomes weak, Harry must call the doctor for help, only to be detained because he first performed an abortion, and then later being responsible for her death. In the end, Charlotte’s husband returns to Harry and hands him a pill of cyanide in jail.
 
‘The Old Man’ follows a convict who was arrested on an attempted train robbery gone awry. This was because what the convict read in books about robberies was totally different than real life, thus bungling it. While in prison, a massive flood rips through due to a levee breaking from a storm. The convict, along with the rest of the prison are taken to the levee where they are sent to row boats and rescue people stranded from the flood. When the convict and his partner get sent out to rescue a woman and a farmer, their boat flips and the convict regains control, and collects the woman who is pregnant. However, from other people’s vantage points, the convict looked like he drowned. For many days, the woman and the convict row around the flood encountering people who give them food, but are skeptical of them, a town that shoots at them while the convict tries to surrender, a paddle boat that takes them in but has other wishes for their labor, an alligator pelt farmer, a sugar cane plantation, and finally back to a police officer where the convict begs to be taken back to the prison. Along the way, the woman’s child is born on a mound of earth with snakes. But when the convict returns, instead of being reward for his efforts in taking care of the boat and the pregnant woman, he’s given 10 more years in prison.
 
There is a reason why Faulkner has become a mainstay in the literary canon. It’s because the language and flow of these two narratives are unparalleled. There’s situational humor with the convict in ‘The Old Man’ being washed down the river, and every time he tries to be detained to go back to the prison, he’s shooed away. While in ‘The Wild Palms’ the scene of Harry in the brothel desperate for abortion pills is quite an interesting scenario. Even on the sentence level, which Faulkner is known for, is so meticulous but grand. In fact, one of my favorite sentences of all time is from ‘The Wild Palms’, “And when he (the doctor), came home at noon she had the gumbo made, an enormous quantity of it, enough for a dozen people, made with that grim Samaritan husbandry of good women, as if she took a grim and vindictive and masochistic pleasure in the fact that the Samaritan deed would be performed at the price of its remainder which would sit invincible and inexhaustible on the stove while days accumulated and passed, to be warmed and rewarmed and then rewarmed until consumed by two people who did not even like it, who born and bred in sight of the sea had for taste a fish a predilection for the tuna, the salmon, the sardines bought in cans, immolated and embalmed three thousand miles away in the oil and machinery of commerce.” What a doozy of a sentence, which I found funny in that the doctor’s wife cooked a huge vat of gumbo in spite of her husband even though the both of them dislike it to canned fish. This is Faulkner’s magic: to create a winding, almost hypnotic syncopation of language. Though, both end grimly: men stuck in prison. One for doing something the love of his life begged for. The other, for doing the right thing and getting more time for it. There’s something to be said of the terrible reality of systems and how even as we do our best, they react in ways we do not expect. I can understand why these two stories are linked, how the narratives don’t necessarily follow each other, but instead they are in some conversation. One of blind love. One of blind faith. Both of survival. I am in awe of these stories in every way and it is no wonder Faulkner has stayed a common household name.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott is a novel which follows a mother and daughter after the husband kills himself by inhaling gas in their New York City apartment. A nun passing by the apartment decides to attend to the commotion where she finds the mother, Alice, pregnant and distraught from her husband’s death. The nun brings her to their church where Alice joins the Sisters in cleaning and folding laundry. Alice gives birth to Sally who grows up watch Alice do the laundry in the church’s basement with Sister Illuminata. One time in the basement as a prank, Sally employs Sister Illuminata to dress her in another sister’s habit, realizing once Alice finds them out that Sally wants to become a nun.
 
Everyone, particularly Alice, is skeptical and so in a “Baptism by fire” trial, Sally follows another nun, Sister Lucy, as she goes about caring for people outside of the church. They first go to a woman, Mrs. Castello, whose leg was bitten and then infected by a dog to care for her while her husband, a milkman, is away working. After they tend to Mrs. Castello, they find a girl crying about how her sisters were tied up by their brother. Sister Lucy and Sally go up to their room and untie them and clean the sisters up when the perpetrator and their brother, Charlie, comes back. Even though it’s heavily implied that Sister Lucy knows Charlie both physically and sexually abuses his sisters, Sally is both charmed by his looks and realizes Sister Lucy isn’t as terrifying as Sally once thought.
 
Following this initial training, Sally feels firm in her conviction to be a nun. So her mother painfully sends her off where Sally boards a train to Chicago. On the ride there, her temper is tested through a large, mean, and racy old woman, a girl who spikes her tea with whiskey and begs for money, and a little child. What Sally realizes on the train is that she doesn’t want to be a nun, so returns home on the next train. However, when she returns home, she finds out that her mother has been having an affair with Mr. Castello. And because of the affair, Sally is told to find another place to stay.
 
The Sisters bring Sally to the Tierney’s house where she and the oldest boy, Patrick, start to get along. Initially, Sally is mad at her mother, but when Mrs. Castello’s health turns for the worse, Mr. Castello abandons Alice to tend to Mrs. Castello. This makes Sally feel for her mother since she is afraid of being lonely. Sally then concocts a plan to poison Mrs. Castello so that her mother and Mr. Castello can marry freely. So one day, she goes to Mrs. Castello’s place where a few of the Sisters are already tending to Mrs. Castello, and she drops in some cleaning chemicals in Mrs. Castello’s tea. Mrs. Castello chokes after a few sips, but it’s unclear whether it’s the illness, the chunky applesauce, or the poisoned tea which make her suffocate. In the end, Mr. Castello and Alice get together and have a child, and Sally and Patrick get together as well. Though, Sally, just like her father, eventually succumbs to her depression after she has kids.
 
McDermott is a genius with this novel. It’s first so beautifully written, each sentence seems to hold its own magic. And while I wasn’t initially interested in reading about nuns, there’s so much drama McDermott shows that it’s hard to look away. There’s the father who kills himself while Alice is gone, and while everyone knows it was a suicide, they try to keep that hidden from Alice and then Sally. But then in the end, depression was what got Sally as well, speaking to the cyclical nature of family conditions and how if not addressed, they can manifest.
 
McDermott also employs time in a very interesting way. In particular, the first chapter follows an old nun as she finds the dead husband, and it is not until the last paragraph does the story fast forward, but also provide the perspective of the story. Initially it seems to be a 3rd Person POV, possibly omniscient narrator, but the last line of the chapter reads, “When our young grandfather, a motorman for the BRT whose grave we have never found, sent his wife to do the shopping while he had himself a little nap.” It provides us with who is telling the story, and what stakes they have in it as well.
 
Another, I think brilliant prowess of McDermott shines through in her transitions. There’s a chapter that focuses on Patrick as he and his father attend his father’s funeral, which in the story seems tangential to Sally. But as we’ll later learn, Sally and Patrick are the narrator’s parents. What works so well is her ability to zoom from Patrick returning from the funeral and his father getting money from Patrick’s aunt to them buying a house for all their kids, to Sally arriving at the house after she has just found her mother and Mr. Castello in their apartment. “A wide bedroom for the parents, and, after all that spreading out, an empty bedroom left over, suitable for a boarder or a guest. / Suitable for Sally when she came to the door, late in the afternoon of the day she returned from Chicago.”
 
And finally, craft-wise, while the narrative and the person speaking throughout the novel never say that Sally failed outright in being a nun, as the reader even before she steps onto the train, we know she will fail. This is because in order to be a nun, you can’t be married or have kids, and based on the narrator referring to Sally as their mother, we know this not to be the case. It’s such a subtle thing, but contextualizes her journey on the train as one of naivety and folly where her fate was already sealed before the narrative arrive there.
 
The novel also peppers in objects/situations that come into play later: the whiskey the girl on the train spikes her drink with also being used to cover the taste of Mrs. Castello’s poisoned tea, the anecdote about the alum when Sally goes into the hotel laundry becoming the building block for her poisoning, the mother and daughter she sees at the hotel talking about getting married when in the end that exact thing happens to Alice and Sally. The novel is clever, drama-filled, and crafted so well I’m left in shock. Brilliant!
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is a novel about a fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who has become fed up with his life and his father in Tokyo, so he runs away. While he doesn’t know where he plans on ending up, along the way he meets a girl, Sakura, on the bus. One night, when he comes to and finds blood on his shirt, he calls up Sakura to ask for help in trying to figure out what happened. Eventually, Kafka finds a library in Takamatsu where he meets the assistant, Oshima, and the main librarian, Miss Saeki. Because Kafka is worried that he killed someone, he tries to lay low at the library. Miss Saeki is an elusive woman who had lost the love of her life when she was younger and was stuck in time, while it’s later revealed that Oshima is trans. Kafka stays at the library, going back and forth from his hotel until Oshima offers a room in the library for him. As the room is getting prepared, Oshima takes Kafka to his family’s old cabin with a forest that two soldiers had once gotten lost in. Then, when Kafka assists Oshima in his library duties and sleeps, on some nights a ghost of a young Miss Saeki sits in the room gazing at a painting. Miss Saeki had once been a singer, producing only one song, from the time her love went off to university, soon to be killed. She had disappeared for some time, which was when Kafka believe that her and his father had him before she ran away with his sister. Eventually, Kafka has sex with both the young Miss Saeki and the older Miss Saeki, falling in love with her. When Kafka learns that the police are after him due to his father’s death, Oshima sends him back to the cabin. At the cabin, Kafka decides to walk into the forest so far that he meets the soldiers that were lost. It turns out they were guarding an entrance to a town that seemed to be in the spiritual world. Upon arriving in the town, Kafka meets both Miss Saeki’s, with the older one telling him he needed to leave before the entrance closed. So with a torn heart, Kafka leaves and returns to the library, a new man, and decides to return back home. The whole time Kafka remembers what his father had said to him, how he would kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. All of which seemed to come true.
 
In addition to Kafka, a second storyline emerges with an older man, Mr. Nakata, who has both lost his memory and is mentally challenged. This was due to an event when he was a child where he fell unconscious for three weeks on top of a hill during a school field trip picking mushrooms. After he woke up, Mr. Nagata was different and could never achieve the goals that his family set out for him. Though, the one thing he could do was talk to cats, which he uses to look for a missing cat called Goma. Along the way Mr. Nakata meets other cats who tell him that Goma may have been kidnapped. It’s only when a dog leads Mr. Nagata to a man called Johnnie Walker where he learns that the cats are being killed and their hearts eaten to create a flute that controls living beings. Johnnie Walker goads Mr. Nakata to kill him, though Mr. Nakata is unwilling until one of the friendly cats is about to be killed. Mr. Nakata then stabs the man with a knife, saving Goma and the other cats. However, it turns out that Johnnie Walker is Kafka’s father, which means that Mr. Nakata must leave Tokyo to evade. And while he did tell the police, they didn’t believe him. Along the way out of Tokyo, Mr. Nakata makes fish and leeches fall out of the sky, eventually meeting up with a trucker named Hoshino. They get along well and while Mr. Nakata doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go, they drive to Takamatsu where Mr. Nakata realizes he must find the entrance stone. They take a few days to look for it, and not until a concept called Colonel Sanders points Hoshino in the right direction, do they find it and open it. From there, Mr. Nakata continues to search for what he needs to complete, and only finds it at the library where Kafka had stayed. When they talk with Miss Saeki, Mr. Nakata realizes that she’s the one that he needs to talk to. She enlists Mr. Nakata to burn her life’s writing, all her memories, before she passes away. That day, as Mr. Nakata and Hoshino are back at their apartment, Mr. Nakata dies and it’s up to Hoshino to close the entrance. The two days after, a black cat tells Hoshino he must kill it before it can reach the entrance stone or else. Late at night, Hoshino finds out what it is, which is a white mucous thing that climbs out of Mr. Nakata’s dead mouth. Hoshino closes the entrance stone, kills the thing, and eventually makes his return back to his job.
 
Murakami weaves so many fantastical and magical things into the modern world it feels truly surreal. There are characters that take on the faces of brands, talking cats, and ghost sex. The novel also isn’t afraid to break form as in the use of interviews for Mr. Nakata’s unconsciousness, the use of the boy named Crow as Kafka’s inner voice/strength, or when the narrative switches to a second person POV during the intimate moments with Miss Saeki. The taboo nature of the sex between mother and son is explicitly referred to when Kafka reveals the curse his father put on him when talking to Oshima, which made the narrative all the more aware of itself. Because Kafka is initially horror-stricken with this curse and the inevitability of it being played out speaks to the way destiny and fate are referred to in the novel. And while I’m not trans, it felt that the reveal of Oshima only worked to deepen his character rather than him being used as a prop. In part, because Kafka is a boy, the language around women does seem a little misogynistic, though makes sense for his character. And while there weren’t definitive answers to if Kafka and/or Mr. Nakata killed Kafka’s father, why the kids in the forest went unconscious, if Kafka’s father was also Johnnie Walker, or if the town was a spiritual middle world, I felt satisfied with leaving those questions unanswered.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Small Wars Manual by Chris Santiago is a collection of poems that upends the Small Wars Manual published by the USMC through erasure. These poems are about the history of America invading the Philippines, the lives of Black soldiers, and the speaker’s understanding of war as a child. There were quite a few poems that I liked, in particular, ‘1.2’, ‘Boondock Suite’, ‘6.4’, ‘3.3’, ‘Hitler Moves East’, ’11.1’, ‘Golden Age’, and ’14.1’. Though, ‘Hitler Moves East’ with its imagery of the brothers playing with toy soldiers and their return to their childhood home in search of their toys felt powerful in how it describes a fascination and then a disgust of war. I was fascinated with how this collection plays with and rewrites a history that America has tried to hide. And in a way, the form of erasure works to take back the voice of America’s victims.
 
Final Rating: 5/5  

​Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is collection of stories steeped in online subcultures, sexuality, and irony. The novel charts the lives of people spiraling into the alt-right pipeline, becoming abusers, repressing and then engaging in their sexuality, and humorously nodding to online conspiracy theories. I really enjoyed all the stories, though in particular, two stood out as the heavyweights, ‘Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression’ and ‘Main Character’. ‘Ahehao’ is about a closeted gay Taiwanese American, Kant, who’s repression manifests in the desire of sexual degradation in gay hentai. The story follows Kant as he first comes out to his friends and family through an email, and begins to explore dating and relationships in his mid-thirties. However, when he starts to date another man, Julian, he is reluctant to have sex due to his worry that he can’t keep his desires at bay. Eventually, they have a falling out and Kant becomes consumed by trying to get an actor to film a video that includes all of his sexual fantasies. But when he sends the email, he realizes it wasn’t sent to the adult actor, but instead to the list of friends and family he came out to. ‘Main Character’ follows the life of “Bee” who abhors the idea of labels on race, gender, and sexuality so much so that it gets Bee into trouble at their college co-op. Eventually, Bee turns to the internet to satiate their desires to “stir the pot”, where they confess in a post that they created thousands of bot accounts to wreak havoc and create discourse, all while their mother is dying of cancer. However, the story itself notes that what Bee describes is really an AI-generated story and none of it was true. The story then takes a step back, noting the theories of who Bee is and in one theory, lists Tony Tulathimutte as the originator of the Bee post.
 
Tulathimutte is a genius at metafiction, nihilism, and humor in his stories which made me feel completely wrapped up in their dramas. ‘Main Character’ itself has so many twists and turns in its narrative that I was left astounded. I did have one small gripe, which was the ending of the first story, ‘The Feminist’. In it, the main character grows up going to school with mostly girls, so assimilates into the identity of a true “feminist”, and what I assume what the internet would call a “Nice Guy”. As the story continues, he is continually rejected by women due to his “feminist” performances, eventually leading him down into the “red pilled” world of incels and the alt-right. The last scene showcases his metamorphosis as he enters a restaurant planning to shoot it up. The ending felt off because, as a reader, I’d gotten enough clues to understand who the character was and his descent into radicalization, so the payoff of his actions felt cheap and too expected. In going with Tulathimutte’s theme of the use of the internet and slightly experimental forms, I wished it went in a different direction (i.e. manifesto). However, that is the only small problem I had with the collection, and was completely entranced the rest of the time.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe is a novel about an entomologist who goes to the desert in search of a beetle. However, when he arrives to the desert, and there are no insects in sight, he eventually comes upon a village that has burrowed holes into the sand where their homes sit. The man asks for a place to stay, and is brought down into one of the holes, where a woman about his age lives. Though, while the man intends to leave the following day, the woman and the village intend to keep him far longer. Every night, the woman digs up the sand that has settled on the ground, where it is pulled up by other villagers, so that they won’t be buried. It’s a constant and unrelenting task that consumes the woman’s time. The man, having realized he’s stuck in the hole with the woman, tries to escape. First by trying to climb the steep walls, then by trying to dig out the sand so that it slopes more easily. All of his attempts fail, and gets him injured, where the woman cares for him for a few days. Thus, their life follows this routine, with the man trying to bide his time for an opening. Then, about two months in, he ties up the woman and tries to use her as his prisoner, pleading with the other villagers taking up the sand that she will die if he isn’t let out. Though, they don’t head his word. His final attempt at escape comes when he drugs the woman with sake and medicine, tying anything he can find into a rope where the ladders are anchored. When he’s successful in hooking his grappling, the man flees from the hole to wait on the outskirts of the village where he can get to the highway. But as he walks, he realizes he’s hit the center of the village, where he runs and gets caught in quicksand. The villagers help him from the quicksand, but throw him back in the hole with the woman. Then, their life returns to what it had been: digging the sand, in addition to falling in love. The thought of escape eventually falls away, and when the woman gets pregnant and is taken to the hospital while the villagers left the ladder in the hole, the man doesn’t leave.
 
Abe is a master at crafting stories that have elements of strangeness in them. The village that has burrowed their homes into the sand, and now have an endless task before them of digging the sand out, is such an odd but interesting setting. Early on, the man thinks of ways that would stop them from having to dig, but it soon becomes apparent that their perpetual lives are ones the village is not interesting in changing. To me, it can read as an allegory in which tradition, no matter how illogical, becomes the facet for which societies create and sustain meaning. And with the man’s continual attempts to escape, the ending becomes a surprise when he doesn’t immediately book it. In a way, he has found comfort in the woman, the sand, such that he’s lulled into the routine. I also was fully immersed into the minutia of the man’s life, of how the sand must be delt with, how it settles everywhere, and his dwindling hope of ever truly escaping. Abe sets us up in the beginning with the knowledge that the man will have been missing for seven years (and presumably longer), which sets the tone for all the man’s attempts. We know that he doesn’t return for at least seven years, while the story follows the first few months of his life in the hole. Thus, signaling to the reader that none of the man’s attempts were ever successful even as they’re read in the moment. It was a truly weird, but fun read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a novel about a young man whose painted portrait displays the age and sin of Dorian, while he stays as youthful as ever. The painter, Basil Hallward, sets his eyes upon Dorian at a party and finds the soul of his art in him. So he decides to paint Dorian. The painter’s friend, Lord Henry, accompanies the both of them during a session, essentially telling Dorian that he is young and that he needs to experience pleasure rather than care about anything else. Once the portrait is done, it’s so beautiful, Dorian cries and when Basil says he can destroy it, Dorian prays that he stay as young and pretty as what the portrait captured. Thus, Dorian takes the portrait home and displays it while he goes about his life. Upon Lord Henry’s suggestion of experiencing pleasures, Dorian attends a play where the actress, Sybil Vane, stars. Dorian falls in love with her, in large part to the talent of her acting. Every night he goes to her afterward, and after a few weeks the two are engaged to marry. Lord Henry is skeptical of Sybil because he believes marriage is not what it’s cracked up to be. Dorian tells Lord Henry and Basil that if they were to see her plays, they’d understand why he wants to marry her. So all three attend a show where Sybil plays Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, but she does so terribly, Basil, Lord Henry, and half of the audience leave. By the end of the show, Dorian is so disgusted and has fallen out of love with Sybil that he tells her as much after. She’s heartbroken when he leaves. Later that night, Sybil kills herself over love. Back at his home, Dorian gazes at the portrait and notices the mouth has turned slightly grotesque. The next day when Dorian hears the news from Lord Henry, he was just about to go back on his word with a letter to marry Sybil. Dorian then finds himself unharmed by the whole ordeal and decides that he can do whatever he wants. For eighteen years, Dorian buys all the things he desires, goes to (I assume) brothels, drug dens, and makes other people’s lives spiral. All the while, the portrait becomes absolutely horrid. Then, Basil confronts Dorian about the rumors outside of his place. Dorian invites him inside and as they discuss, Dorian says that if Basil wanted to see if he truly was what everyone said he was, he’d go upstairs. In the room Dorian has stored the painting, Basil sees it has taken on all of Dorian’s age and bad deeds. As Basil is crying over what Dorian has become, Dorian sees a knife on the desk and slits Basil’s throat. The next day he has his old chemistry friend dispose of the body by blackmailing him. A time passes where he starts to get cravings for opium, so gets a ride an hour away late at night where he goes to a den. He sees the man he’s ruined, and doesn’t want his friend to know he smokes anymore. So he goes down to a wharf where he knows someone else is selling opium. However, Sybil’s younger brother approaches him and threatens he will kill Dorian because he had killed his sister. Though, Dorian says that because it was eighteen years ago, how would it have been possible when he still looked so young. Dorian escapes before Sybil’s brother realizes it was actually him. Later on, when Dorian attends a shooting party, the man he’s with inexplicably shoots Sybil’s brother, the man Dorian had greatly worried about. In the end, Dorian decides to destroy the painting because it has only brought him misdeeds and evil. As he does so, the painting is transformed back into the youthful beautiful man he once was, while the dead Dorian is an old wretched heap.
 
Wilde really made this story sing with the tension of murder, suicide, and Dorians actions. Though, I couldn’t help to read the novel with a queer lens when Dorian is first discussed. “…but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The mere visible presence of this lad…The harmony of soul and body!...if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me!” This is when Basil is talking about why he painted Dorian, and the reader is led to believe that it was purely because Basil saw the distillation of art in Dorian. Though, over and over again, Basil is desperate to paint Dorian, lending a feeling of love that goes far beyond painting. The question of why Dorian hasn’t married, or frankly, has a woman in his life after eighteen years is quite telling, when Lord Henry is still by his side. It also felt like there was a hint to this when Dorian blackmails the chemist alluding to a secret he will reveal if the chemist doesn’t dispose of Basil’s body. The question is, what was in the letter Dorian intended to send if the chemist didn’t do what he was told? At the time, being queer was very likely for someone to be kicked out of high society. So because of the mystery within the letter, it lends itself to this type of reading. This may also explain why Lord Henry feels apathetic towards marriage and goes to Dorian after his divorce.
 
There was a lot to love in this novel, and I felt totally immersed in the extravagant and dark life of Dorian Gray. Which is funny because in the edition that I have, there’s an introduction by Allan Donaldson who seems to be dismissive of the novel. He says, “The Picture of Dorian Gray is not a great novel, and its failings are often the failings of an amateur uncertain of the imaginative atmosphere which his characters must inhabit of they are to remain credible…Nevertheless, the novel survives while other, abstractly better, novels of the period have been forgotten.” I think it just confuses me to have such a lukewarm introduction for the book someone had ostensibly bought. It leaves me wondering why have Allan Donaldson give an introduction in the first place? Regardless of the critique, I really enjoyed Wilde’s scenes, the way he can zoom out eighteen years, the descriptions of people, and the way Dorian is tainted by Lord Henry’s philosophy.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote is a collection of three stories, two of which are autobiographical. ‘A Christmas Memory’ is about a young boy and his sixty-year-old friend, Sook, who decide to make fruitcakes to send out to friends and family. Then on Christmas, they give each other kites that they had made. ‘One Christmas’ features the same speaker going to his father’s house in New Orleans for Christmas. The boy doesn’t want to go and when he arrives, learns that Santa isn’t real upon seeing his father set out the presents. He then begs his father for a plane he saw earlier in his visit, so his completely drunk father buys the expensive gift and sends the boy off to return to Alabama. The final story, ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’ is about the same boy being bullied by another boy, Odd Henderson, and when he tells Sook, she invites Odd Henderson to their Thanksgiving dinner. When Odd arrives and the speaker sees him take Sook’s brooch, he accuses Odd of stealing. Though, his plan goes awry and Sook covers for Odd. The boy, angered by what Sook had said, runs off to their barn, where she eventually joins and comforts him.
 
Capote captures the childlike feelings of nostalgia and conflict in this collection. Each story is rooted in time and place and has this feeling of bittersweetness. There’s love exuding in the relationship between the boy and Sook, fractured at times, but always repaired. It’s succinct, and understands the tenderness of childhood.
 
Final Rating: 5/5