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torchlab's reviews
129 reviews
Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono by Yoko Ono
5.0
This is a delightful, tender, enigmatic little book. It tricks you into thinking it is simple: its childlike tone and easy playfulness belie a cutting wit and sophisticated artistic intent that can only come from someone with the expansive, idiosyncratic mind of its author. I am not an avid reader of poetry, but some of the pieces in here are among the best poems I’ve ever read. Each one is like a small door to some imaginary but no less real place where a house can be built of light, where orchestra audiences can fly, where a painting can be made with all the blood in your body.
Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms by Daniel Kharms
4.0
What a strange, befuddling, delightful book. Reading this felt like finding a map that connected all these literary and artistic movements I’d known about individually (e.g. Oulipo, Theatre of the Absurd, microfiction, even alt-lit to an extent) but had never thought of before as descending from a common lineage. I love how many of Kharms’ stories end with an abrupt turn, or a refusal to continue the tale—it’s like the literary equivalent of a Looney Tunes character running straight into a brick wall. Also loved Matvei Yankelevich’s excellent introduction and notes, which provide a nuanced and careful look at the political context of Kharms’ work.
Luster by Raven Leilani
4.0
This book is so much smarter and weirder than the fact that they sell it at Target led me to believe.
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados
4.0
This book is more than anything else a masterful bit of sleight-of-hand. You go into it thinking it’ll be a frothy, lighthearted romp through New York, and for the first quarter of the book or so it is unambiguously that. But as the summer draws on, darkness begins to encroach on the protagonists’ fun. You are reminded, subtly but unforgettably, that these two young women are undocumented, motherless, and poor. Their relentless pursuit of glamour and hedonism starts to seem desperate, at times harrowing, even as it is still thrilling and hilarious. That all of this is recounted in Marlowe Granados’s vivid, clever narration, with an equally incisive eye turned to the pleasure and the pain, turns this book into something far more complicated and heartbreaking than the youthful caper it might be otherwise easy to dismiss it as.