Modern Library Revue
March 5, 2010
Modern Library Revue: #80 Brideshead Revisited 6
by Lydia Kiesling
Evelyn Waugh is your bi-curious hipster boyfriend.
January 20, 2010
Modern Library Revue: #72 A House for Mr. Biswas 4
by Lydia Kiesling
I don’t tend to condemn books solely because the writer was some variety of wretch. But I have done so if I think it will create a smoke-screen for the fact that I did not understand the book.
December 21, 2009
Modern Library Revue: #17 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 4
by Lydia Kiesling
Carson McCullers attains a level of virtuosity on many fronts, but I was most taken with her depiction of relationships, many of which balance on a knife edge of propriety, wavering back and forth between the lovely and the weird and the outright perverse.
November 25, 2009
Modern Library Revue: #42 Deliverance 11
by Lydia Kiesling
The story is told in a self-consciously poetic way, as if the author wrote it while sitting behind a duck blind with a camouflaged typewriter, looking at a picture of Walt Whitman and listening to Wagner.
October 23, 2009
Modern Library Revue: #95 Under the Net 9
by Lydia Kiesling
Someone once said (it was me) that Iris Murdoch wrote so many novels that if you are in the mood to read something by her, there is probably a fresh one available.
September 28, 2009
Modern Library Revue: #78 Kim 10
by Lydia Kiesling
Kipling, I have observed, is catnip to gentlemen over a certain age; how far they are over that age determines how much they own up to his allure.
