Modern Library Revue
March 5, 2010
Modern Library Revue: #80 Brideshead Revisited 9
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 11
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.
