Yesteryear (2026)by Caro Claire Burk

Book Review

Yesteryear (2026)

by Caro Claire Burk

   I do love me a hit, and Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burk, is one.  It's a Number one New York Times bestseller, Anne Hathaway snapped up the adaptation rights, and of course every book club in American is seemingly getting on board.  I read the first half in an eBook edition then switched to the Audiobook version.   The log-line is "trad wife influencer wakes up on a real 19th century farm...and hates it."  However, like many works of successful contemporary literary fiction, Yesteryear is really a story about a smart young woman from a difficult background trying to come to terms with her role in society.  As someone who is already mildly interested in the "trad-wife" movement (mostly monitored by following the Peter Thiel-backed lifestyle brand for women, Evie, I was interested in what Burk had to say about the movement, as well as its critics.  I was not disappointed.  Burk proves an adept observer of internet culture while not pursuing any stylistic tics that would put off a would-be reader.  Beyond the lit fic high concept, Yesterday is a traditional novel about the difficulties of being a young woman in contemporary society, as related to Emma Bovary as it is the tik tok account of Nara Smith.

   I had issues with the pacing at times, and the fact that the protagonist was so very unlikeable, but that is the point with an unreliable (?) narrator.  

Nonesuch (2026) by Francis Spufford

 Audiobook Review

Nonesuch (2026)

by Francis Spufford

    I really enjoyed English author Francis Spufford's last book, Cahokia Jazz, an alt-history work of detective fiction where Native Americans survived and evolved in parallel with Euro-Americans in the Midwest.  I really, really loved the alt-history part of Cahokia Jazz whereas the actual story was a pretty straightforward take on detective fiction.  Here, my preferences swung in the other direction, I wasn't wowed by the scenario, but I found the actual plot and characters interesting.   In Nonesuch, Spufford has moved back to the UK, where he finds his protagonist, Iris Hawkins, staring down the barrel of World War II.  Hawkins is a self-described "Suburban Slut," and a second generation "City" girl, where she works for a stockbroker of the Jewish persuasion and dreams of achieving financial success as a female stockbroker (literally illegal in that time and place.)   

    One night she ditches her date and finds herself at an avant-garde film party where one-reel art films are played over phonographic records.   There, she meets her romantic interest, Geoff, a technician in the nascent television department of the BBC as well as her nemesis, Lady LaLage Cunningham, a British Aristo Fascist.   The plot involves the occult, and an attempt by the British Fascist movement to travel back in time and prevent England from coming into the war against the Nazi's.   Along the way she learns about her feelings and has a decent amount of lit fic sex- Spufford must have been keeping tabs on the romantasy trend, because there was exactly zero sex in Cahokia Jazz.

Now I Surrender (2026) by Alvaro Enrique

 Audiobook Review

Now I Surrender (2026)

by Alvaro Enrique

Translated by Natsha Wimmer

 I am a big fan of Mexican author Alvaro Enrique.  I was especially excited for the English language translation of his 2016 novel, Now I Surrender, a combination of multiple novellas taking place in Apacheria.  At times, Now I Surrender reminded me of Roberto Bolaños, 2666, of the corpus of work by Teju Cole and of course, Cormac McCarthy, the forever laurearte of the North American desert Southwest.  The first strand of Now I Surrender is the McCarthy-esque bit- a 19th century Mexican army captain leading a rag-tag bunch of "troops" in search of a kidnapped Mexican woman.  This portion contains the kind of hard to stomach violence that one associates with McCarthy's border trilogy, though the characters have a distinctly Mexican point-of-view, vastly different from McCarthy's affectless Americans.

 The second strand is a writing/rewriting of the events surrounding the capture of Geronimo and the last band of wild Apache Indians.  This section is more like Enrique's other work- a poetic reimagining of very real historical events, with characters who sound like modern people.  

  The final strand is a Teju Cole Esque part about a character who sounds very much like the Author- a Spanish language writer of some repute, living in New York City and struggling with his split Mexican/Spanish identity.  Seeking clarity, he takes his wife and children on a tour of Apacheria, where he muses on the subjects in the other two stands of the book.

  At first, I was a little disappointed, but as the book moved forward, I found myself engaged.  Even though this book was published a decade ago, it still felt fresh, like it could have been published this year. Highly recommend this book and the rest of Enrique's bibliography, he is one of my favorite active writers in any language.

Capitalism (2025) by Sven Beckert

 Book Review

Capitalism: A Global History (2025)

by Sven Beckert

  I don't care about money all that much, but I'm obsessed with Capitalism, particularly the history of capitalism.  I'm also a fan of historian Sven Beckert- I really liked his Empire of Cotton, which I read back in 2019.  I also enjoyed his anthology Slavery's Capitalism, which I read in anticipation of the release of this book.   As much as I'm interested in any single subject in world history it is the history of capitalism.  Beckert's effort is laudable and about as good as any book for a general readership which takes in this entire subject in one volume is going to get.

 Much of what Beckert seeks to establish is the global part- recognizing that capitalism is NOT just something that happened during the industrial revolution in northwest Europe.  Beckert identifies an idea of the pre-modern capitalism of "nodes" or islands, of merchant driven capitalism that extend back to the dawn of civilization, in places like Oman, India and Venice.  These were physically small places where capitalism was defined by long-distance trade, and its exponents were merchants. 

 He then moves to what is probably the most important, and least well understood chapter, the era of "War Capitalism" which lay-people know as the colonial period, where western polities (and later, Japan) expanded into the New World and Africa and established a commodity-production model of capitalism that relied heavily on clearing land of indigenous peoples and replacing them with huge, single product plantations powered by slave labor.  Historically, defenders of capitalism sought to distance it from this epoch, but Becker relies on a half-century of scholarship which places War Capitalism and slavery at the center of the world-capitalist experience. 

 The War Capitalist chapter is really the high-point, with Beckert synthesizing a lot of scholarship that may be unfamiliar to a casual reader.  After that, everything gets pretty predictable:  The initial industrial revolution, the second aka "Fordist" industrial revolution, the rise of consumer capitalism, etc.  There wasn't much after the war capitalism chapters that really held my attention but it is hard not to appreciate Beckert's ability to make a dry subject (economic history) come to life for something resembling a general audience.

Beasts of the Sea (2023) by Lida Turpeinen

Audiobook Review

Beasts of the Sea (2023)

by Lida Turpeinen

Translated from the Finnish

by David Hackston

  Beast of the Sea caught my eye simply because it is translated from the Finnish, and this is only the seventh book translated from Finnish to make to this blog (Unknown Soldiers (1954) by Vaino Linna, Crossing (2019)by Pajtim Statovci, Meek Heritage (1938) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Year of the Hare (1975)  by Arto Paasilinna, The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson and the The Manila Rope (1957) by Veijo Meri.  Sillanpää is an obscure Nobel Prize winner, and the rest are one-translation wonders.   

  The hook for Beast of the Sea is that it is only loosely a "novel", really more a set of connected novella's/short stories centered around the geographic area where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered and hunted to extinction within a generation of being "discovered" by the west.  So one bit is about the naturalist on the expedition where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered. Another bit is about a Finnish naturalist who came to possess one of the only skeletons of said Steller's Sea Cow after extinction. Then you've got a part with the English wife of a Russian Governor of Alaska (rough gig). Each chapter contains conventional novel stuff with more scientific stuff.   The link that runs through each chapter is just as much the place where the Sea Cow came from as the Cow itself. 

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025) by Lyndal Roper

 Audiobook Review

Summer of Fire and Blood (2025)

by Lyndal Roper

    Billed as "the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation," Summe of Fire and Blood delivers on the promise, bringing the English language historiography of this poorly understood episode in early modern German history into the present.  It was also a great Audiobook snag- the kind of book I'm really looking for in the Libby app.  The problem with being interested in a subject like "Early Modern German history" is primarily that most of it is written in German.  What is written in English is always going to be heavily weighted towards the academic//specialist market.   I thought going in that this was a German language translation, but no, it is apparently true that the first history of the German Peasant's War in a generation was written English.

   The use of the 'German Peasants War' (instead of German Peasants Revolt, which is what I grew up with) should tell you about the perspective of the author- it's very James Scott/David Graeber, looking at things from the bottom up and trying to tell the story of people who weren't well educated and didn't write everything down.   Roper goes hard on the origins, motives and the heady days when various bands of roving peasants were able to sack unguarded Monasteries and bully townsfolk into submission.  They were benefited from the generally chaotic political situation in German speaking areas- polities were split between conventional nobility, church-run states and independent towns. 

  The ruling authorities didn't seem to be particularly aware that such a thing as a peasant revolt on a large-scale was even possible.   Of course, gradually the nobility got their act together and when it finally came to peasant armies vs. the military of the early modern era, the peasants got crushed.  The payback was brutal- which Roper covers but doesn't really dwell upon.   Surely there is a Foucauldian take that would emphasis the payback portion over the war itself.

The Book of I (2025) by David Greig

 Audiobook Review

The Book of I (2025)

by David Greig

   The Book of I is a fun, short novel out of Scotland set in the Middle Ages in the aftermath of a Viking raid of a British Church.  The Vikings murder everyone except a young apprentice who hides in the latrine and the wife of the blacksmith, who escapes by rendering her attacker unconscious with a glass of extremely strong mead.  So strong that his compatriots give him a half-ass burial and depart, leaving him for dead.  The remnant Viking wakes up the following day and has to figure out his next move.  It is low stakes fiction with a couple episodes of extremely brutal violence.  Very short.  I love books set in the Middle Ages that aren't historical fiction or fantasy, just literary fiction set in the past.  This is one of those books.

Ice (2026) by Jacek Dukaj

 Book Review

Ice (2026)

Jacek Dukaj

  Ice, arrives as a bit of a Polish-language literary sensation, and English language audiences have been waiting for the translation since 2017, when London based published Head of Zeus acquired the rights.  The translation, by Ursula Phillips finally dropped in January and of course I had to purchase this 1200 page alternate history fantasia as soon as I learned it existed.   Ice is hard to describe properly for a number of reasons.  I've seen it described as a cross between science fiction and alternate history and steam-punk lit, but we all know that steampunk isn't a literary thing and alternate history is, in fact, a sub-genre of science fiction.  

  The catalyst is that the object that crashed into the Earth and caused the Tunguska event in June 1908, transformed the landscape in some poorly understood way, causing a novel kind of ice to shoot out from the epicenter and spread across the world.  Presumably as a result of the consequences of this event, there was no World War I and no Russian Revolution, meaning that the alternate history of the book is essentially a world where the 20th century didn't happen in Europe but the industrial revolution of the 19th century did.  The protagonist is a Polish national (Poland is/was part of the Russian Empire), who is set a task by the Czar's secret police:  Locate his long-missing father who is rumored to be an agent for "the ice." 

  They then put him on the trans-Siberian express- a journey which consumes at least half of the 1200 pages of the book, and he is then buffeted by mysterious forces, some who support the ice and some who want it gone forever.  The supporting cast includes real life scientist Nikolai Tesla, here an agent of the Czar sent to defeat the ice.  The train is hundreds of pages of philosophical debates which is surely meant to remind the reader of 19th century Russian author-philosophers, while at other times the tone is decidedly Pynchonian minus the songs and laughs.

  By far the most challenging aspect of Ice is the fact that Polish allows authors to write in a kind of second person singular style where the narrator is the protagonist, but the author is not using personal pronouns.  I've had the same experience reading other Polish authors- most recently Olga Tokarczuk, but here it was particularly hard to follow.   Not hard to follow- hard to appreciate, I guess you could say.

Capitalism and Its Critics (2025) by John Cassidy

Audiobook Review

 Capitalism and Its Critics: A History:

 From the Industrial Revolution to AI (2025)

by John Cassidy

    I read about Capitalism and Its Critics in the New York Times, where Jennifer Szalai wrote an excellent review.  Cassidy is best known as a writer on economic topics for the New Yorker.  Both the review and Cassidy's pedigree gave me the idea that this would make a great Audiobook and sure enough, nine months later, I was able to check out a copy of the Audiobook from the Los Angeles Public Library.

  And reader, I was rewarded.  Capitalism and Its Critics is as accesible as it is interesting, and while Cassidy treads no new territory, he does an excellent job of summarizing centuries of economic thought while sparing the reader/listener from reading any of these often-obtuse authors.  More then once while listening to Capitalism and Its Critics I was struck by the thought that it is the eternal fate of the most famous economists to see their work mis-understood and applied by people who haven't read their work.  I'd wager most readers would associate criticism of capitalism with the "Left" as defined by a line of thinkers following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, but Cassidy reveals just as many critics from the "Right." The major difference is that most of the critics from the left, at least up until the time of Keynes, were persecuted, whereas critics from the right tended to end up in power or see their acolytes in power.

  Two themes that Cassidy hammers home are:

1)  Capitalism lives in a perpetual state of crisis.

2)  The idea of a Capitalism existing outside of a State made legal framework is ridiculous.

   Thus, his major criticism of critics from the right is that they live in a fantasy of the free market that is nothing short of fantastic, while at the same time allowing Dictators and Authoritarian strongmen into their tent under the guise of limiting state action in the economy (see Chile).  Meanwhile, he accurately points out that critics from the left have simply been wrong in that they start from a premise that the contradictions inherent in capitalist activity will inevitably lead to the collapse of capitalism.

   He also breathes life into figures I would have considered minor players before reading this book- Karl Polanyi and Joan Robinson to name two and he also develops time periods that don't get much attention in the west- specifically the period of Russian economic thought between the Russian Revolution and the ascension of Stalin.   Even if, like me, you are largely familiar with the history of capitalism without being a specialist or expert, you will find the writing engaging.

    

Murderland (2025) by Caroline Fraser

 Audiobook Review

Murderland (2025)

by Caroline Fraser

  Murderland has an interesting and persuasive thesis: That the spike in serial killing in the 60's and 70's was directly related to industrial activity poisoning children with lead and other toxic substances.  Fraser combines this narrative with capsule biographies of famous American serial killers- Ted Bundy gets most of the ink in Murderland. Fraser also intertwines her own memories of a girlhood in the Tacoma era- the epicenter for factory pollution and serial killers.  The business part of the story is familiar- Mid 20th century capitalism pursues profit at the expense of the environment.  I presume those who are interested in serial killers will know much of that stuff to- I'm not, and I don't know much about Bundy, so I found that bit interesting- Bundy was an audacious killer- he kind of embodies every stereotype that parents fear and his targets were anything but women on the margin of society.   Fraser's memoir material didn't do much for me. 

Seascaper (2025) by Benjamin Wood

 Audiobook Review

Seascraper (2025)

 by Benjamin Wood

  I'm sure I only heard about Seascraper, by English novelist Benjamin Wood, because it was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.  It was a good pick for an Audiobook because it is set in seaside village in the English countryside, so you get some good regional accents.  There is also a strong musical element in the plot, and in the Audiobook you actually get to hear the song that the protagonist writes in a moment of inspiration.  The setting is literally atmospheric- with dense, wet fog playing a key role in the development of the plot.  And, winningly, Seascaper is brief enough to be considered a novella, thought personally I would go with short novel.

Little Bosses Everywhere (2025) by Bridget Read

 Audiobook Review

Little Bosses Everywhere: 

How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (2025)

by Bridget Read

  I try to keep at least one non-fiction Audiobook in my Libby mix at all times.  Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, has been on and off my metaphorical libby loan shelf a half dozen times over the past year, and I finally knocked it off during the break.  I've had an interest in pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing since I started work in the world of federal criminal defense as an attorney.  One of my first tasks was reviewing physical documents at the Boiler Room Taskforce in Mission Valley, San Diego, CA.  This was for a telemarketing scam, but the documents I reviewed contained "training materials" that led me to explore this nefarious world.

 Multi-Level Marketing, as Read details exhaustively, is here to stay, and the second and third generations of some of the founding families of MLM are familiar to anyone who knows Cabinet level appointments in the Trump administrations, one and two.  The roots of multi-level marketing are in the idea of the pyramid scheme, which is an actual event that happened in the US, and not just a generic term to describe a type of scheme to defraud.  The history, in fact, goes quite deep, and spans the country, and, in fact, the entire world at this point.

  I knew many of the details, and found the personal stories of the victims (Read doesn't talk to many winners, if any) pretty tedious, but Read, despite her stated thesis that all multi-level marketing is scam, does point to the reason that MLM's endure despite their scam status- which is that people drop out, in fact, everyone who isn't a "winner" under the system drops out, and the winners maintain their status because they can source new people to recruit.  That is 100% the key to success in any MLM, finding new leads and converting them.

  There was an interesting chapter near the end where Read discusses the newest iteration of this world, the growth of "life coaches" or "mentors" as entrees to the MLM business.  Certainly, this seems like something that would be facilitated greatly by all Social Meida platforms, and it strikes me that is more or less a valid way for such people to make money.

All That We See or Seem (2025) by Ken Liu

Audiobook Review

All That We See or Seem (2025)

by Ken Liu

  Chinese American author-translator Ken Liu is known equally well for both- my introduction to him came through his role as translator of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  He also has a fantasy series that I'll never read.  I checked out All That We See or Seem because, despite the hackneyed "girl hacker" premise and obvious IP/multi art form pitch and description of the first book as being part of a series, I was pretty sure that Liu would have some interesting things to say about hacking and computers and, god help me, AI.

 In that sense, Liu delivers- the actual hacking type stuff is amazing, the rest of it, is, at best average and often bad- like the characters, the back story, the overall predictability of the plot. I think that's the idea though, so who am I to say it isn't good.  I listened the Audiobook, but I wish I hadn't- the teen hacker main character is not particularly interesting, so you end spending much of the listen on her tedious backstory.

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by QNTM

 Book Review

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025)

 by QNTM

    I happened across this title perusing the shelves at a Burlington, Vermont bookstore, where it had one of those handwritten "employee recommends" cards attached.  I don't know about you, but I always take the time to read these- whether it's a Barnes & Noble or what, because I think you can really tell about a specific Bookstore based on whether the employees can identify books that I a) don't know about and b) want to read.    There is No Antiemetics Division jumped out to me on a couple levels, first, what the employee wrote on the card was interesting. Second, it was clearly a horror-science-fiction genre title that was placed in the wider "new releases" shelf at the front of the store, that shows me the book or author already has escape velocity from the genre shelf.  Last, the cover promised "cosmic horror" AKA Lovecraftian horror without the not-so-subtle racism.  

  You can describe the plot easily enough, a secret government agency labors against the horrors of the unknown, but that doesn't do the material justice.  Specifically, it doesn't describe the role that memory plays in the horror aspect of the plot, thought there is also non-memory based actual horror along Lovecraftian lines. Unlike most first gen cosmic horror, QNTM (a nom de plume for an English author/programmer Sam Hughes), does describe said horror, rectifying a major issue with that genre (how long can an author keep describing a nameless, unknowable horror without actually describing said horror.). 

  I found There is No Antimemetics Division really mind-blowing in the way of most great genre fiction.  The fusion of memory-language sci-fi and cosmic horror was revelatory in a way similar to the initial Matrix movie- genre but transcendent, classic genre.   Worth reading for sure.

Dominion (2025) by Adie E. Citchens

 Audiobook Review

Dominion (2025)

by Adie E. Citchens

 I listened to this entire Audiobook thinking it was one of the picks for the Mississippi chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project but lo and behold, came to learn it was not.  It should be- Dominion is a very geographically specific novel about the family of a wealthy and successful small town African American Baptist minister.  There are two narrators, the wife of the minister and the girlfriend of the youngest son of the family, a star football player and secret monster.

  I thought Citchens did a great job of imagining this world- far better than many of the authors on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.  This book would definitely make any revised list I put together.

The Captive (2025) by Kit Burgoyne

 Audiobook Review

The Captive (2025)

by Kit Burgoyne

  Kit Burgoyne is the horror nom de plume for science fiction author Ned Beauman.  I read Beauman's 2022 novel, Venomous Lumpsucker back in 2023 and it inspired a pretty thorough review. Beauman remained in my mind as a solid example of a genre writer with literary fiction reach, so I was interested when I read that he'd launched a horror alter ego for his new novel, The Captive, which  has been described as, "A Rosemay's Baby for the late capitalism period."   In other words, he wrote an A24 movie.  So be it! I'll take an update on Rosemary's Baby any day of the week.  Within the horror genre, I am particularly interested in the detailed depiction of the craft and practice of horror-genre devil worshippers. Devil worship is such an interesting inversion of conventional religious practices, and I like to see how different authors depict the practices of the various versions.  

  Here, Burgoyne/Beauman links the devil to the UK equivalent of the GEO/Wackenhut group- a privately owned corporation that runs quasi-public institutions like prisons, jails and mental hospitals. As someone who visits privately run prisons on the regular, including immigration facilities, I can testify that Beauman's take is a little hysterical.  His merry band of anarchist-terrorists who put the plot into motion seem to have extremely fuzzy ideologies but are firmly committed to putting the plot into motion by concerted criminal action. 

  The Captive was a fun audiobook; I'd recommend it as a good format here.

  I'm thinking Jenny Ortega as the lead.

The Pretender (2025) by Jo Harkin

 Audiobook Review

The Pretender (2025)

by Jo Harkin

   The Pretender is a rare 2025 Audiobook listen, written by English author Jo Harkin, one of the cover quotes describes it as "Glorious Exploits meets Wolf Hall" and I agree. Specifically, I agree with the comparison to Glorious Exploits which brought some contemporary characterization into a historical milieu while still keeping things from getting anachronistic.  There's a pot of gold for any writer of literary or historical fiction who can pull off this trick- see the endless attempts by the film industry to recharacterize and repurpose novels from the early 19th century.  Clever stuff, recommended. 

Luminous (2025) by Silvia Park

 Book Review

Luminous (2025)

by Silvia Park

     2025 was a down year for literary fiction neither the race for the Booker nor the National Book Award interested me- I didn't even recognize the semi-finalsts for the National Book Award.  Luminous, by first time novelist Silvia Park, stood out to me this year as an excellent combination of genre (science fiction) and literary fiction themes.  Luminous moves in a couple different directions and handle all its issues in a way that isn't overly didactic or stereotyped.    Luminous is one of the first really vivid visualizations of what a post-human society might look like- here we have characters who are part robot, part human, humans who have familial relationships with robots and robots that definitely, definitely want to be human.  At times, the literary fiction element made me feel like I was reading a contemporary I, Robot as written by Virginia Woolf, but my take is always that a difficult to read novel is interesting in a way that an easy-to-read novel simply is not.

  I'd highly, highly recommend picking up a copy of Luminous if you can find it in a book shop.

Helm (2025) by Sarah Hall

 Book Review

Helm (2025)

by Sarah Hall

  The New York Times review of Helm by Sarah Hall was enough to get me to check out an E-book copy from the library.  I'm a fan of ANY novel that stretches the format of the novel in any direction and a novel about a specific, named wind in the northeast of England qualifies in that department.  Hall picks out different characters over time:  A prehistoric shaman-ess, a 19th century scientist, a contemporary teenage girl with a mental disorder, and places them in relationships with Helm, who has their own, distinct, narrative voice.  It makes for engaging reading.

Katabasis (2025) by R.F. Kuang

Author R.F. Kuang

Audiobook Review

Katabasis (2025)

by R.F. Kuang

   I'm not a fantasy novel guy- I haven't read Babel, R.F. Kuang's big fantasy hit, nor her multi-volume epic Poppy War trilogy.  I know those books were hits, that they won genre specific award, etc.  I did however read Yellowface, her first NON fantasy novel, and I liked it, I have to say I was deeply impressed by Kuang on a number of levels, most of which are contained in the intro to her Wikipedia entry, which is one of the best I've ever read:

Rebecca F. Kuang (born May 29, 1996) is an American writer of mostly fantasy novels. Kuang was born in China and schooled in Texas before she studied Sinology at Cambridge and Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. In 2025, she was completing her PhD at Yale University.

   She went to college at Georgetown for college, but I get it, and more importantly, I feel like I get her.  First and foremost, this is an author writing these books in her spare time, while she is still a full-time student.  And I mean this with the greatest respect, but she isn't writing from a well of life experience. That's also part of the appeal, this tremendously acute perspective but also so youthful. 

  Yellowface wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but it was good, and it was fun and it was wicked- so few books in the world of literary fiction are fun in any way shape or form, and fewer are wicked.  It's a rare trait that I personally associate with English/British writers like Will Self and Ian MacEwan.  When I read that Kuang's new book was a "campus novel goes to hell" I sighed.  I don't like the campus novel, but I've read a few because of their propensity to make it to canon level status. It certainly has something to do with the fact that the primary audience for literary fiction is people who are literary professionals- teachers, students of literature, graduates, would-be writers, actual writers, professionals who write as part of their job.

 In my mind the weakness of the campus novel as a genre is that it is too "inside baseball," certainly the stakes are invariably low from an objective standpoint (Will person X obtain a successful academic career against odds y or will a struggling mid-career academic manage to rescue a sense of self from the compromises required by everyday life.)  In that sense, Kuang again proves herself a savvy author by transporting her Cambridge Analytical Magic undergraduate protagonist to hell.

  In the book, magic is real, but from a metaphorical standpoint magic appears to be a stand-in for critical theory and/or philosophy.  Kuang invents an entire backstory for the role of magic in this world that parallels the story of 20th century critical theory/logic/philosophy with the central players being magic analogues of the Anglo-american analytical/logical philosophy.  She also draws up a very interesting take on hell that combines Eastern and Western traditions in a thoughtful and consistent way. 

  She contrasts the literal journey through hell by Alice Law and her male counterpart, Peter Murdoch, with flashback chapters from both perspectives.  Those chapters were tedious, an excuse for a highly successful author being able to write her campus novel with what presumes is minimal pressure from her publisher.   I'm not sure Kuang really grasps the depths of the human heart but frankly I do not give a fuck.  There are enough of those books- give me a writer with a quick wit and a sense of adventure. In that sense, Katabasis does not disappoint.