Lauren Slater’s prose is beautiful. She has a gift for lyrical writing and her verbal associations are sharp and sensual. This is an excellent book (which, unfortunately, suffers from an uneven tone of voice) that straddles the binary of fact and fiction, focusing instead on the narrative or emotional truth of her story, even while admitting that some or many or most of the story elements are false or ‘not factual.’

Helena Kvarnström is one of my favourite artists. I have three of her prints in my house. It’s only money that keeps me from buying them all.

I got her book Violence in the mail today. I first read it in 2002 when she published it in zine form. The new version is mostly the same, but with streamed down prose and gussied up presentation (Tiphanie Brooke’s cover design is beautiful).

Violence is a delicious, disturbing and ultimately compelling book. It shoves in your face everything you don’t want to know about sex and disgust, desire and pain, love and violence. Helena’s work has always been unsettling in its ability to tackle familiar pieties and to confront you with uncomfortable needs. Our refusals to see danger where it lies are deeply personal and protective, but Helena’s book helped me to perceive the circumscription of my own thinking about love, sex and violence.

Jennifer Vandever’s debut novel is a highly literate addition to the ‘chick lit’ genre. It has some chick lit elements (romance, job dissatisfaction, glamour), but is missing the more cliched plot elements, such as expensive martinis, stiletto heels, etc. The story arc, moreover, does not reflect typical the singleton-to-couplehood-with-numerous-pratfalls progression of the genre.

The protagonist (name forgotten) is a graduate student searching for the lost letters of Charlotte Bronte and engaged to her boyfriend of six years, an Orwell scholar. The arrival of celebrity-scholar Claire Vigee destablizes Protagonist’s equilibrium, as well as provides much of the novel’s most biting satire. Her fiance leaves, she loses her funding. In the meantime she becomes romantically involved with a movie producer who wants to develop film based on the lives of the Brontes and moves with him to LA.

What distinguishes this novel from others of its genre is the sharp observation about inner life, love, and the means that people use to navigate complicated emotional terrain. In this sense, it is clearly influenced by its titular forebears. Well-worth reading.