Attention Span 2010 – Tim Conley

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell | New Directions | 2009

If you’ve read the first two, you’ve read the third; if you’ve not read any, what are you thinking?

Tom McCarthy | Remainder | Alma | 2006

Francis Carco, trans. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert | Streetcorners: Prose Poems of the Demi-Monde | Green Integer | 2004

Irregular moments of flânerie, economically and sharply framed. “It seemed to me as if a new sensibility had penetrated me.”

Lara Glenum | Maximum Gaga | Action | 2009

You know that party you went to, thinking you knew someone there, but it turned out you didn’t know anyone at all and you couldn’t believe what people were saying and wearing? And you were a little scared, sometimes more than a little, and long afterwards you look back on that party as perhaps one of the best parties you ever went to. This book is that party.

Vanessa Place | La Medusa | FC2 | 2008

Normally my interest dampens at the scent of a rewriting of Ulysses, and Place’s novel fits the bill, though with a very American apocalyptic sensibility and conclusion. But it’s the bubbling springs of language that make this book special: this novel is alive in a way that so many are not.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, trans. Joanne Turnbull | Memories of the Future | NYRB Classics | 2009

Svetlana Boym | The Future of Nostalgia | Basic | 2002

A rich investigation of cultural displacement, a redefining of “nostalgia.” Those Moscow girls make me sing and shout.

Richard Overy | The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars | Allen Lane | 2009

Although deserving of a quibble or two, this history of British anti-war sentiment and activism offers a nice counterpoint to the usual Churchillian bluster.

More Tim Conley here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.