Sunday Morning! “The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish” by Katya Apekina
A great and complicated story about an unhappy family where every member is unhappy in their own way.
Author: Rufus F.
Old Men in Poorly-Fitting Pants
It’s too horrible to say any of this so baldly, so we find nice ways to phrase it. But that does us no good, recoiling into a cozy bed of euphemisms.
Sunday Morning! “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” by Hanif Abdurraqib
Music writing as autobiography, poetry, & survival. Seriously, read “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” by Hanif Abdurraqib right the hell now.
Sunday Morning! “Little Bones” by David Baillie
David Baillie’s second novel is a supernatural mystery set in a surreal crumbling landscape where I live.
Sunday Morning! “The Water Cure” by Sophie Mackintosh
Maybe we could call them “Ms.Topias,” these novels about suffering women under totalizing systems of patriarchal control. They seem to be having a moment.
Sunday Morning! “The Summer He Didn’t Die” by Jim Harrison
In times of stress, it’s good to return to nourishing comfort food, which for me means Jim Harrison’s prose.
Sunday Morning! “Good Citizens Need Not Fear” by Maria Reva
While getting by in strange times, I read a book of short stories about how average Ukrainians got by before and after the fall of Communism.
Sunday Morning! “Fantastic Night” by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig perhaps wrote so well about reversals of fortune because he suffered one himself.
Sunday Morning! Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” (1986)
Tarkovsky’s final movie, about a man willing to sacrifice everything to undo the cataclysm engulfing his world, rings strangely true right now.
Sunday Morning! “Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918” by Laura Spinney
Do you have any books lying around that you keep intending to read once the time is right? Laura Spinney’s “Pale Rider” is one of those books for me.
Sunday Morning! “Fever Dream” by Samanta Schweblin
Parenting is terrifying, if this novella is any indication. And Schweblin makes much of the sheer terror of parenting
Sunday Morning! “Wavelength” by Michael Snow
This week, I got to see a 16 mm screening of Michael Snow’s groundbreaking 1967 experimental film ‘Wavelength’ without knowing anything about the film or the director beforehand.
Sunday Morning! “Four Souls” by Louise Erdrich
A book about an Ojibwe woman’s path of revenge- following a longer digression about “representation” in fiction.
Sunday Morning! Hollywood’s Eve and Eve’s Hollywood
On the once forgotten Hollywood storyteller and the recent biography that reminded us of her own story.
Sunday! Obligatory Oscar Post Part 2.
Subjective takes on four more Best Picture contenders: Marriage Story, The Irishman, Ford v. Ferrari, and Parasite.
Sunday Morning! Obligatory Oscars Post (Pt. 1)
The glitz! The glamour! The self-importance! Gearing up for the 92nd Academy Awards with slightly (okay, largely) irreverent impressions of: “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”, “1917”, “Jojo Rabbit”, and “Joker”.
Sunday Morning! “Ducks, Newburyport”
Our minds are messy places. This novel takes you into the very nervous mind of an Ohio mother, housewife, and pie baker over the course of a thousand pages and mostly through one very long sentence.
Sunday Morning! “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”
Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece is a nail biting Hitchcockian thriller about housework. Really.
Sunday Morning! “They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears”
A friend’s favorite book from last year, which describes a terrorist attack that either happened or did not happen, depending on which timeline we’re living through.
Sunday Morning! Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Christmas is a time for weird encounters and uncanny happenings.
