I’m happy to say that the wonderful online journal Big Other has published my review of Ray Levy’s novel School. I’m hoping you’ll read the review, and pick up a copy of one of the most challenging, yet rewarding books I’ve read in a long time. Please support presses like FC2 that champion experimental fiction and, more generally, work excluded by mainstream publishers.
I find writing book reviews to be particularly rewarding, at times more rewarding than writing in other academic forms. Not only do you get to give back to literary communities by supporting, amplifying, and evaluating great books, you get to shine a little spotlight on works that might not be seen by everyone in our current attention economy. It’s also a great venue to think about the review not only as evaluation (a good book? a bad book?), but to apply a sharp literary analytic focus to the work, to hopefully bring out aspects of contemporary literature worthy of our greater attention.
Certainly School is one of these books that, through its voice, structure, and form, has stayed with me for some time. Take a look and see!