-
A Review of The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
By Jay Innis Murray I asked ChatGPT: What would you do if a mushroom grew out of a crack in your bathroom tile and the mushroom kept coming back after you pulled it out? Before giving me six bullet-pointed steps on how to deal with this problem, the chatbot said: The mushroom itself is just Continue reading
-
Stealing Einstein’s Underpants – A Review of The Delegation (2025) by Avner Landes
By Jay Innis Murray One of the things that seems to me to be artificial about most fiction is that it pretends as if experience and thought and perception are linear and singular and that we’re thinking and feeling only one way at a certain point in time. You know, some of that is the Continue reading
-
A Review of On the Calculation of Volume 1 (2024) by Solvej Balle
By Jay Innis Murray New Directions has cleverly chosen November 18 for the publication date of Book 3 of On the Calculation of Volume. Anyone who has read Book 1 can tell you November 18 is the day in the life of the novel’s narrator that repeats, over and over, hundreds of times. No Bill Continue reading
-
A Review of The Cannibal Owl (2025) by Aaron Gwyn
By Jay Innis Murray There is a lot of dying in the 66 pages of Aaron Gwyn’s new novella The Cannibal Owl (published this January by Belle Point Press). This short book tells episodes in the life of Levi English (born 1817) who lived in Texas when it was still a frontier. It is a Continue reading
-
A Review of Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024) by Sergio De La Pava
By Jay Innis Murray The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors. – China Miéville, Theses on Monsters But down these mean streets a man must go who is not Continue reading
-
A Review of The Haunted Screen (2024) by JM Tyree
By Jay Innis Murray I remember the first time I watched Vertigo. My parents owned an MCA Home Video VHS copy of it. I was thirteen, according to my notebook of the era. I think that’s reliable. Even then, I loved movies that looked deep into obsession and pulled things out of the muck. God Continue reading
-
A Review of Let the Boys Play (2024) by Nicholas John Turner
By Jay Innis Murray “Firm ground is not available ground.” – – – AR Ammons, “Dunes” Here is a book that does not flinch. Here is a book about suffering. This is my novel of the year for 2024. Let the Boys Play sings a long song of contempt and disgust. It chants of living Continue reading
-
I ain’t a mule, Huck: A Review of James (2024) by Percival Everett
By Jay Innis Murray I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint-sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and resourceful or Negro. And a little later I could imagine myself as Huck Finn Continue reading
-
Topography of Terror: A Review of American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
By Jay Innis Murray In his 2021 interview with Dustin Illingworth, Mauro Javier Cárdenas teases and waves at the influence of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape on his then work-in-progress. It’s a delightful back and forth that shows off how Cárdenas thinks about fiction, long sentences, and the influences upon him of authors who came Continue reading
-
The Fragile Hammering Bird Heart of Novels: A Review of Like It Matters by Lee Klein
By Jay Innis Murray On Bloomsday in 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, launching in capsule Vostok 6. She orbited the Earth 48 times before landing successfully. Her call sign was Seagull. From space, she radioed to Soviet mission control, “It is I, Seagull! Everything is fine. I see the Continue reading
About Talking Big
All posts by Jay Innis Murray.
Always on the lookout for new books to review. Please drop me a line at grashupfer@gmail.com or say hi on Twitter, Mastodon or Blue Sky.
Read my novel here: https://tinyurl.com/p98jtu7c
Recent Posts
- A Review of The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
- Stealing Einstein’s Underpants – A Review of The Delegation (2025) by Avner Landes
- A Review of On the Calculation of Volume 1 (2024) by Solvej Balle
- A Review of The Cannibal Owl (2025) by Aaron Gwyn
- A Review of Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024) by Sergio De La Pava
Talking Big 