SHORT CUTS (Raymond Carver) - November 8/08

These short stories are certainly quite well written and often very truthful, though Carver's penchant for abruptly ending each and every one of his stories is a bit of a head-scratcher. *** out of ****

NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU (Miranda July) - November 3/08

I'm certainly glad I read this after I saw July's film, as this collection of stories is almost infuriatingly quirky and downright insufferable. July has populated these tales with characters that are almost uniformly inauthentic, and it consequently goes without saying that the very sporadic instances of relatable elements are lost beneath the author's pervadingly (and annoyingly) off-kilter modus operandi. An irritating, pointless effort. * out of ****

INDIGNATION (Philip Roth) - November 2/08

As usual, Philip Roth's superb writing allows one to overlook some of the flaws within the book in this story about a '50s era young man whose inability to relax eventually gets him kicked out of school and sent to Korea (where he dies and thus narrates the novel from the afterlife). *** out of ****