Dear Reader Megaphonic

Michael struggles with an unconventional mashup of holocaust memoir and sports-based dystopia in Georges Perec’s W, or The Memory of Childhood, while Emily is captivated by the sexual politics of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, yet frustrated by its open-ended narrative.

Michael is captivated by the brutality and isolation of pre-modern Newfoundland in Michael Crummey's The Innocents, while Emily delights in the “tragedy of manners” and the woes of bored rich people fallen on hard times in Patrick deWitt’s French Exit.

Michael posits that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (“the most Victorian of Victorian novels”) is the anti-Atlas Shrugged, while Emily considers just how much thicker blood is than water with Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer.

Michael joins his name-twin on the greatest adventure undertaken by humankind and finds him companionable, warm, and wise in Carrying the Fire, while Emily breaks down the walls of the “chick lit” ghetto to revel in City of Girls, a surprising story of feminine sexual liberation.

Emily strongly recommends an encounter with the disorienting bleakness and collapse of Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s Blindness, while Michael strongly recommends an encounter with the soul-wracking cruelty and violence of Megan Gail Coles’s Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.

Michael reads J.M. Sullivan's Newfoundland Portfolio, and Emily reads Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman.