Noel B

It's always hard to judge short story collections, especially because I want to evaluate them as a cohesive whole, which isn't always possible. Also it's hard to actually judge a book when someone gives it to you for free with the implicit understanding that you'll review it because there's always the temptation to go "loved it, you guys should buy it and also people should definitely send me more free books, I have good ROI :)"

Anyway a while back Malarkey Press sent me this book and I read it and enjoyed it! But I did think it was an uneven collection. Some of these stories are clear winners and some are...fine. It's a sampler of weird, offbeat, sometimes funny and sometimes disturbing short fiction that I mostly really liked.

• except you can't really "finish" this book you can just put it down for now

Hopscotch continues to be a lot of fun. Olivera fucking sucks but he is right. For context the first bit is the end of Perico's diatribe about an "inconsistent" author that has a tiny woman in one page be over two meters tall later on. Also these are all pseudo intellectual losers so of course they say "soma" when they mean "physical body"

"...I have noticed this more than once. There are scenes that start at six in the evening and end at five thirty. Disgusting.

-And don't you happen to be a dwarf or a giant depending on your mood? - said Ronald.

-I'm talking about soma - said Perico.

-He believes in soma - said Oliveira - Soma in time. He believes in time, in the before and after. The poor man has not found in some drawer a letter of his, written twenty years ago, he has not reread it, he has not realized that nothing holds together if we do not prop it up with crumbs of time, if we do not invent time so as not to go mad."

Weirdly enough, Cortázar's Hopscotch reminds me a lot of reading The Secret History, vibes-wise.

Like there is a (unintentional, perhaps) longing for aspirational intellectual pursuit, even as both books are 100% roasting the people that participate in it.