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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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Category: Review

Review: Sex And Vanity by Kevin Kwan

A fizzy adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room With A View.

Contemporary, Fiction, Italy, New York, Novel, Racism, Romance

Review: The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A big history of people that demolishes the myth of progress.

Anthropology, Archaeology, History, Nonfiction, Politics

Review: The Essential Emily Dickinson (selected by Joyce Carol Oates)

Strange, precise and elusive poetry.

America, Emily Dickinson, Poetry, US

Review: Things I Don’t Want To Know by Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy concisely summarises what makes her own writing so compelling.

British, Female writers, Memoir, Nonfiction, South Africa, UK

Review: The Plague by Albert Camus

The Plague is understandably back on best-seller lists: the parallels with our current situation are striking.

Classics, COVID-19, Nobel Laureate

Review: Here Until August by Josephine Rowe

Here Until August is an intriguing collection of 10 short stories. They often feel haunted and uncanny.

Australian, Short stories, Stella Prize

Review: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

Celestial Bodies achieves a kind of literary perfection.

Arabic writing, Man Booker International, Novel, Oman, Translation

Review: Watchtower by Elizabeth A. Lynn

A strange, rather beautiful and ultimately quietly devastating novel.

Classics, Fantasy, Fiction

Review: The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab

I can’t say I enjoyed this book very much – it’s full of domestic tragedy – but I was impressed by its intensely claustrophobic mood.

Australian, Contemporary, Short stories, Stella Prize

Review: Flight Lines by Andrew Darby

Flight Lines is one of the most beautiful and moving books about nature I have read in a while.

Conservation, Environment, Nonfiction

Instagram

I’ve been enjoying reading the two Pulitzer-winning plays of Tennessee Williams.
You‘ve probably seen the memes: A historian contemplates two women who lived together their entire lives and never married men. Friends? the historian wonders.
The second of Yumna Kassab’s books is much like the first, a novel in pieces. Set in and around Tamworth, NSW, it is a deeply human portrait of communities dealing with the challenges of rural life: isolation, tribalism, suicide and above all drought.
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