Smashbomb

"Porter accomplishes an extraordinary amount in a few pages. She addresses the horrors of war from a woman’s perspective; she touches on the difficult a terrain a working woman must navigate in a man’s world; she creates a desirable male, describing his physical allure from a female point of view: quite rare in most fiction. But most astonishing, in chronicling Miranda’s near death experience and her reluctant return to life, she describes the indescribable and deals with the most profound human issues: life, death, identity, in shatteringly beautiful prose."

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Richard Serra recommended Poems of Paul Celan in Books (curated)

Poems of Paul Celan

Paul Celan | 2021

(0 Ratings)

Book Favorite

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."

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The Chocolate Lady (94 KP) rated The Deal of a Lifetime in Books

Oct 5, 2020

The Deal of a Lifetime

Fredrik Backman | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry

10.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

I would like to request that people not read the blurb summary of this book that I found on Amazon. It is far too long and detailed for such a concise work of prose. Even if Backman approved of how much of the story they’ve included there, I certainly do not. However, if you want to know my opinion of this beautifully constructed and thought-provoking novella, please read my review here – which will not give away hardly anything of the story, I promise!
https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2017/11/04/a-new-christmas-carol/

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Coast: A Portrait in Pictures and Words

Charlotte Fraser

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Book

There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and...

Ari Augustine (10 KP) rated We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite in Books

May 4, 2020

The prose of WE SHED OUR SKIN LIKE DYNAMITE is beautiful, thoughtful, and a complicated mess of life.
I fully expected the usual confessional poetry and was pleasantly surprised by the depth of many poems, which touch on subjects such as abortion, sex, and substance abuse. I found the word play interesting and alluring, while occasionally surpassing boundaries I wasn't aware existed. Though it's not my *favorite* collection, it's certainly a cerebral and fluid one, offering up a depth of experience difficult to find in these shallow modern poetic waters.

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Spring; Summer; Autumn; Winter

Melissa Harrison

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Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... in prose and poetry both old and new, the acclaimed Seasons series...

travel poetry nature

David McK (3835 KP) rated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Books

Nov 1, 2023

First things first: I downloaded this as a free e-book from (I think) Project Gutenberg, and have actually been reading this for a while on an on-and-off basis - able to do so as this is really a collection of short stories rather than a novel in its own right.

It's also not hard to see why Sherlock Holmes is such a popular character: the mysteries are all entertaining, while the prose is not so dense as to be off-putting to the more casual reader.