Isabella Agostino

Category: Book Reviews

  • Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro

    A Review Plus 60 cm Acqua Alta Mariette Navarro spends the length of Ultramarine creating and deciphering the boundaries that an unnamed protagonist has to make for herself in her father’s shadow, in man’s shadow. The captain is professionally competent but, privately, restless. One day, she makes an uncharacteristic decision to let her crew stop…

  • City Like Water by Dorothy tse

    A Review plus 100 cm Acqua Alta It’s horrifying to watch a place you called home erode in slow motion until one day the map stops matching the ground it claims to show. Dorothy Tse catapults this horror across nineteen feverish chapters. An unnamed narrator tries to keep the city and her family together but…

  • The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

    A Review plus 100 cm Acqua Alta There is a particular kind of American mythology built on borrowed grandeur, the idea that if you stand close enough to something vast and eternal, some of that permanence rubs off on you. This sentiment is the death of all in Joyce Carol Oates’ slow unraveling novel centered…

  • Biography of X (2023) by Catherine Lacey and Still Born (2020) by Guadalupe Nettel

    Two Novels, One Conversation Fact: Still Born and Biography of X are written in the first person, seemingly by someone who exists in our world. Fact: Both texts’ narrators focus primarily on someone close to them, initiating the reader into a fictional biography-memoir situation. Another fact: I enjoyed these books immensely. Still Born is Nettel’s…

  • The Guest (2023) by Emma Cline

    Reviewed by Isabella Agostino ⋆⋆⋆⋆ The Guest is set in an upscale beach town on Long Island, following Alex, a twenty-two-year-old who spends a few days drifting in a haze of drugs, sex, stealing, sun, and sand. Her objective? Killing time before making amends with middle-aged Simon, who abruptly ended their arrangement in Chapter 3.…

  • Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer (2021) by Rax King

    Reviewed by Isabella Agostino ⋆⋆⋆ Looking back, I was well advised before embarking on this collection that it would be, as the blurb states, “personal,” approached with “heartfelt honesty,” and infused with “King’s trademark humor.” All true. All a bit, well, understated. In retrospect, though, I was warned. Backstory: After reading Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties…

  • The Human Stain (2000) by Phillip Roth

    Reviewed by Isabella Agostino ⋆⋆⋆⋆ I can’t decide whether I absolutely love or hate the way Roth ended this, which is why I docked a star. The chaos of the last chapter mirrors the kind of whirlwind you get swept up in when people close to you pass. I felt disoriented, unable to fully absorb…

  • The Shortest History of Germany (2017) by James Hawes

    Reviewed by Isabella Agostino ⋆⋆⋆ I’m no historian, but Hawes presents reasonable evidence for some well-founded takes. The only problem was the editing…so many typos. 😬 That said, I still really enjoyed this! It’s a quick read with plenty of visual aids, and it made me want to explore specific aspects of German history, so,…

  • Great Italian Short Stories of the Twentieth Century / I grandi racconti italiani del Novecento: A Dual-Language Book (2013) By Jacob Blakesley

    Reviewed by Isabella Agostino ⋆⋆⋆⋆ The presentation and organization of this book made it easy and enjoyable to engage with. I appreciated that the stories were presented chronologically rather than by theme or topic, it helped me better understand the historical context and draw my own conclusions about how language and culture evolved over the…

  • The Netanyahus (2021) by Joshua Cohen

    Reviewed by Isabella Agostino ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆ Perfect book—the kind you cancel plans to read. Quick, hilarious, stunning. I cringed, I laughed, I underlined. But above all, I wished desperately to read it again for the first time. Side note: This is how I discovered Fitzcarraldo Editions, an independent publisher founded in 2014. They publish a number…