Small-Press-Club

Quincy’s Absence was my book club’s pick for May, and it’s one of the books we’ve read that I’ve appreciated (enjoyed might not be the right word) the most over the past year. I was sad to miss the group’s discussion; I finished the book around 9pm in an ER with a fractured fibula. For a short book, Absence does read longer, probably because of Quincy’s very (occasionally very) long and sometimes meandering sentences. Though, as someone known to word-count sentences and to go through and circle the number of commas in a passage, I never felt the need to do so while reading. Only in transcribing the notes below did it occur to me how long they sometimes are. The bigger contributor to the elongated feeling is probably the darkness; it feels that there is a suicide or death besides every few pages. The book is really about our narrator encountering different people who have lost others, who are soon to loose others, or who in their distant past have lost them and continue aching across the years. ...

My review will be shorter than the average paragraph in this book. The paragraphs are so long and so punctuated by ellipses that after a time my eyes began to slide across the pages and shift up and down and all around trying to track the internal monologues of our characters. I resisted this at first, feeling that I was losing some sense of coherence. Eventually, I gave up on this and understood that the impression of scattered internality is at least a part of the point. These characters are all wrapped up in themselves, and in how their expressions of self communicate status and prestige. ...

This will be a short note. Ana Simo’s Heartland was my small press book club’s March pick, and wow! Unfortunately, I did not like it. I found it so grating to read that I couldn’t finish it, despite getting about 90 pages into its 200something pagecount. I felt the use of slurs so over the top that it smelled like an amateur novelist trying to scare the reader, to tell them, Hey, this is Serious Stuff. But it did not work for me, and only made me roll my eyes. ...

February’s book club pick. I felt excited to vaguely engineer the polls such that we could finally cover a Semiotexte title, not to mention one that I was certain would be weird and gay. The certainty proved well-founded, because I more or less am not sure what happened in the book, but I enjoyed every page, such that some of these very sad paragraphs can be enjoyed. Gary Indiana’s book is at least faintingly autobiographical, though whose to say just how much. Some parts seem so clearly translated from real people that I refuse to believe their synthetics. I did not read the introduction before reading the book so became educated that at least one character seems to be directly inspired by Susan Sontag, which I found just delicious. ...

1/2026 Review John William’s Stoner is the January 2026 selection for my Small Press Fiction Book Club. My history with the book is intertwined with that club; initially a fellow member recommended it to me back in probably early 2024, and then the my friend and the club’s first facilitator let me borrow her copy of the book. I found a lot of kinship in Stoner (in my first review I use the words ambivalent and aloof, two words that a therapist once used to describe a younger version of myself). ...

This was the November pick for our Small Press Fiction Book Club. I liked it! I wish I could say I loved it, but that’s not quite true. I found it really challenging to read. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, paired with very long sentences and a myriad of commas and semicolons and parentheticals takes a lot of effort to hold through. You can almost feel yourself running out of breath; I have to imagine that’s intentional. ...

I eagerly await hearing what my book club folks think about Seethaler’s book. I thought it opened with a lovely picture, and then there were some vignettes that I found compelling, but ultimately this felt overlong (and it’s only 190 pages), or perhaps it just felt so slow as to be hard for me to focus on. Notes Author: Robert Seethaler Last read: 2025-10-24 Rating: 2.5 Form: Fiction ...

I thought this was a lovely little book. Read for the small press fiction book club that I’m in, I certainly would never have known or read something like this without that. I thought the ‘satire’ of it all was fairly surface, but I found that surface very pleasant. The writing is a bit whimsical, and the wordplay pleased me something terrible. I also found it oddly musical (particularly the recurrent, ‘While You Were Out’). ...

What a weird book! I spent the first 50 pages wondering, “Am I going to hate this?” My hackles were raised by the Lispector quote; I tried to read Apple in the Dark some months ago and found it absolutely grueling and couldn’t finish. But I found this quite readable! Mechanically, the writing is serviceable but not amazing. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and sounds sort of rigid. Then again, I think our characters are pretty strange people, and for some of them, I think they would speak like this to appear more sophisticated than they actually are. So, I’m willing to go with some of the very strange dialogue. Someone in our book club pointed out that the italic usage is odd, and I didn’t notice this so much until the ending 40 pages or so (which I read after the book club). There are definitely some strange empresses. All that said, I never bumped on the writing like I sometimes do, it all flowed rather nicely. I found it very readable and often enjoyed reading it, even if I was not at all enjoying the characters’ decisions or actions. ...

I tried and tried. I got 5 pages in and started begging for paragraphs. I got 20 pages in and decided maybe it wasn’t the right time, so I put it down and read a 700 page fantasy book. I read 20 more pages and could barely force myself to focus on it. I put it down at 50 intending to DNF it. I see every review mention that it picks up at page 60, so I go back. At page 70 I start skimming again, totally unable to keep my focus. I find it painfully boring. I skimmed the rest. This style does not work for me at all. ...