This is the blog I publish over at Untitled Books, a literary website based in the UK that you all should check out. I’ll post all the blogs here, just in case you don’t wander that-a-way.
Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection prefers that you submit only one story at a time, or up to five poems at [...]

One of literature’s greatest living authors writes his own posthumous fictionalized biography, in which he airs his deepest fears that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope.
Reviewed by Tommy Wallach
Upon putting down [...]

Perils of the Pansexual
This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.
“He [...]

A new collection of vintage educational shorts offers a peek into the anxieties and hopes of earlier generations
By Tommy Wallach

Oct. 12, 2009 | Once upon a time, the film projector was the teaching tool of the future. Schools all over the country purchased the temperamental, whirring machines, prompting a flood of educational shorts that offered [...]

Of Violence and Beauty
Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and this book, which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.
At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over [...]

(This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.)
Today, the NYTimes, my go-to source for rant-inspiring material, ran an article entitled “Country’s New Face: It’s Young and Blonde”. Hearkening back to sometime in the early 18th century, the piece expresses [...]

Start Making Sense
In Yoko Tawada’s latest novel alienation becomes downright alienating.
A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear [...]

Fallout Girl

Another take on the post-apocalyptic novel proves that this venerable genre is anything but a wasteland.
“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”
So begins author [...]

The Old Maid’s Tale
Ninni Holmqvist’s  speculative novel about the treatment of the elderly is harrowing but implausible.
The use of the term “speculative fiction” as a more respectable sounding synonym for “science fiction” is attributed to Robert Heinlein, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1947. But since then, the two genres have diverged: “science fiction” [...]

One is not the Loneliest Number
This brilliant Dutch novel explores themes of loneliness and connection
It isn’t easy to write a compelling novel about loneliness, for the simple reason that loneliness is boring. It makes for something of a paradox: the feeling of aloneness, both literal and figurative, counts among love, loss, and taxes as [...]