In The Lightning Jar author Christian Felt spins out a curious mix of the imaginative and the impossible - or seemingly impossible. For nothing is really impossible in a child’s imagination. This short story collection contains perplexing shifts in which the reader must allow for fanciful surprises and arresting changes of scene and mood. But how better to conjure a child’s active mind, and where better to set it than in Scandinavia the backdrop Hans Christian Andersen used. Mr. Felt twirls...
June 14, 2018
"The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer forces our sympathies in the first-person narrator’s direction. His exposition of a spy’s secret and challenging life endears him to us; it’s honest, funny, even charming. Set in the years following America’s pullout of Viet Nam, Sympathizer presents us with the narrative of one man’s navigation of the treachery, prejudice, and continued illusion of those who would dream of re-establishing a capitalist regime in the South. The story’s narrator is not named, but he works for...
June 02, 2018
"Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin
David, a young American man, sleepwalks through Paris in the years following World War II. He lives on money in a trust which his father charily metes out to him - requests for which may or may not be met. David ostensibly awaits the return of his fiancée from Spain, although it’s never clear that he looks forward to her return all that impatiently. Instead, he falls in with a couple of lecherous Parisian businessmen, whose tastes clearly run to the homoerotic. David falls in and dallies...
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