Literary Fiction Archives - Robert Breen 📚

Departures by Julian Barnes

April 17, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Julian Barnes’ latest book, Departure(s), is difficult to classify. It’s part memoir, part literary analysis, part diary, and part meditation on friendship, memory, and the finality of death, while still leaving room for the story of how the narrator (unreliable?) introduced two friends at Oxford, and how, after a 40-year gap, he brought those same friends together again with hopeful intentions. Unlike a novelist’s artistic godlike designs, we are soon reminded that there are few happy endings in life. Things happen for no reason. Or don’t. And death is cruel and final.

It seems to me that humans are often so busy living that they forget they are human – or at least forget what it is to be human, and what its consequences are – and therefore what it means to be dead.

Along the way, we are treated to glimpses of the author’s private life: his adoption of a dog, his insomniac writing in the middle of the night on his IBM Selectric typewriter, his eccentric journaling practice, the many vagaries of aging, his battle with cancer, and his grief of losing his wife of thirty years. There is a continual flow of dark wit, though melancholy lies just below the surface of almost every page.

Barnes turned eighty when this book came out. He says it will be his last, preferring to have the final word, and dreading the potential for dying in the saddle, mid-sentence. And yet, I can’t help wondering if he might still have more to give us. Earlier this year, he married his former publisher and long-time partner. This seems like an optimistic act. If not another book, we can at least hope he finds peace and love. We should all be as lucky.

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

March 29, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Claire Keegan is fast becoming my favorite living author. This latest book features three short stories, though just the title story is new. The others were reprinted from her earlier two collections of short stories (Antarctica and Walk The Blue Fields, both of which I now have on order).

A theme connects these stories, as hinted by the book’s subtitle: “Stories of Women and Men.” Indeed, each story depicts an unhappy encounter between the sexes with unsettling consequences.

My favorite was So Late in the Day, where a man reflects on his sad life on what should have been his wedding day. He treated his fiancée horribly, but can’t seem to accept responsibility for his deplorable behavior once she broke off the engagement. A flashback to a breakfast with his family when he returned home from college will haunt me for a long time.

An autobiographical thread runs through The Long and Painful Death, where a writer’s idyllic residency at a renowned seaside cottage is disrupted by a crazed and misogynistic academic.

Antarctica is the shortest and bleakest story of the collection. Tension builds throughout its few pages to a devastating end.

Ordinarily, any Claire Keegan book garners an automatic five-star rating from me. In this case, I knocked off one star because this one offered just a single story that hadn’t already been published. If I had known this, I would have read the new story online with my New Yorker subscription and purchased her two short-story collections instead.

Highlights

Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.

She watched the clock on the bedside table, the red numbers changing. The cat was watching her, his eyes dark as apple seeds. She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.

The Hustler by Walter Tevis

March 9, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Fast Eddie Felson is a hustler trying to make a living playing pool. He has the talent, but lacks the grit and endurance to prevail in a game that requires a gambler’s mental toughness. As someone who has spent way too much time circling a pool table in dive bars, who, in fact, met the love of his life playing pool in a dive bar, reading about Eddie’s love of the game put me in a fine reverie:

Eddie loved to play pool. There was a kind of power, a kind of brilliant coordination of mind and of skill, that could give him as much pleasure, as much delight in himself and in the things that he did, as anything else in the world. Some men never feel this way about anything; but Eddie had felt it, as long as he could remember, about pool.

There are parallels between Eddie Felson’s pool and Beth Harmon’s chess in The Queen’s Gambit (also written by Tevis). Both protagonists have a self-destructive side, both are alcoholics, and both find a way to overcome adversity with the help of a coach or a friend.

Unlike Beth Harmon, Eddie isn’t a likable person. He makes questionable decisions, treats people badly, and seems to care only for himself. This made it hard for me to root for him as he faced his demons later in the novel. Knowing more about his life before we meet him as an small time pool hustler could have deepened his character for the reader.

Still, if you have even a passing interest in pool or gambling or gritty city life, this is a great read.

Foster by Claire Keegan

February 1, 2026 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Another masterpiece from Claire Keegan, this one about an unnamed child who spends a summer with her aunt and uncle on a farm on the coast of Ireland. We soon learn that the child has been utterly neglected and is in dire need of love and attention. Her aunt and uncle have their own grief, and we bear witness to a summer of tremendous healing for this newly formed family.

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

It’s astonishing how Keegan crafts so much story with characters of real depth in so few pages. The language is economical, yet lyrical. And moving. I did not want this to end. When I finished, I turned back and read it again to savor it more slowly and pick up on things I missed.

Favorite Highlights

‘Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’ I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between. ‘Can you see it?’ he says. ‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’ And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

January 31, 2026 / Literary Fiction, Reading

Set in a near-future New York City, we follow ten-year-old Vera, an exceptionally gifted yet anxious child, through a dystopian landscape of far-right extremism, absentee parenting, cultural diversity, and hilarious yet ominous technology.

Throughout the novel, Vera’s intelligence allows her to wrestle with dilemmas no ten-year-old should ever have to face alone. My heart broke for this little girl, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved.

Of course, without gravity, everyone in heaven would fall straight to hell, a word Anne Mom did not like. But that’s how the universe worked, Vera thought. You wanted to believe someone was in a pretty place like heaven, but really everybody, herself included, was living in hell.

I did not expect to be as moved as I was by the end of the novel.

As an aside, I was able to attend “pub day” for this book at the 92NY in New York City, where Shteyngart and Amor Towles discussed the book and took questions from an intimate audience. I love New York!

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

January 4, 2026 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Because of the subject matter, the death of a child, I read this highly acclaimed novel with trepidation. O’Farrell writes beautifully, and she lulled me into a world of a quasi-fairyland of evil step-mothers, abusive fathers, young impossible love, magic forests and elves, and the joy of life in harmony with nature.

While there were inklings and premonitions, the book carries on for two hundred pages before anything truly awful happens. When the tragedy finally strikes, the writing tone and structure shift from a conventional novel to short, trance-like visions of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Most people can only imagine the mere surface of grief like this. O’Farrell writes with brutal honesty as if she knows exactly what this is.

How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.

While Shakespeare is never named, his character represents an important counterpoint in the novel. He begins as an unhappy son with ambitions far beyond his father’s business, a suitor and newlywed, a fledgling playwright separated from his wife and family, and finally as a grieving father.

I won’t spoil it, but the ending is about as perfect as you could wish for a novel dealing with the loss of a child.

Favorite Highlights

Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was.

She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day. She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.

(and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).

“O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

December 6, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

I listened to the audiobook, which was probably a mistake. I could not stand the narration, particularly Louisa’s strident voice, which made me cringe for much of the book. How these teenage characters spoke, acted, and thought rang false far too often. The author’s continued use of literary device cheats grew tiresome by the end. I loved the book’s ideas and themes, but not its execution. As was repeated often, this was a really long story. Too long for me.

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

December 3, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

I have a strange weakness for novels that involve chess. I adored The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (the book was so much better than the Netflix series). It’s the utter brutality of the game, but without the bloodshed, where wits matter, not brawn, or wealth, or greater numbers.

Surely it is championship chess, and not boxing, that is our most dangerous game—at least so far as psychological risk is concerned.
Joyce Carol Oates

This short, tight novella is about chess, yes, but it’s also an examination of the lengths the human mind will stretch and strain without variety or socialization.

Nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.

A good chess story, but an even better story of the psychological dangers of extreme isolation and single-minded focus.

A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker

November 19, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

I love a great short story, but I don’t read enough of them. I decided to read one every night alongside my other reading. And what better source than this mammoth treasure of short fiction from the New Yorker Magazine’s first hundred years?

There are some well-known stories here that I had read before, and many from authors I knew well, but not their shorter works. Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” still amazes me for how much story can fit into just a handful of pages. And Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” continues to shock and fascinate me no matter how many times I’ve read it.

Out of the remaining 76 stories, there were a few that missed the mark, but most were very good, and some were fantastic. My favorites:

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Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

November 3, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

This is a difficult book to describe without spoiling the entire story. There are two plot lines at work: the narrator, a severely disabled and reclusive scholar writing a history of his literary grandmother, and the life of that grandmother, her husband, and children, eking out a difficult life in 19th-century American West.

Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.

Stegner is a favorite writer of mine, and I trusted him through the first 500 pages that all this story would transcend the descriptions of an untamed West and the travails of unlucky pioneers.

My patience was rewarded by a spectacular ending, though any other writer might have lost me long before I turned that final page.

I’ve now read four of Stegner’s novels, saving this one, his Pulitzer Prize winner, for the last. I thought Crossing to Safety was his best, and Big Rock Candy Mountain absolutely gutted me. Still, I think this one will stick with me for a long time.

Highlights

I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity?

Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.

Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.

“What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?” “I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.” “What?” “Horizontal. Permanently.”

Some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle

August 16, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

This insightful review by Adam Woods of On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) intrigued me enough to read this puzzling book, the first of a planned seven-volume series. Five books have been published in Balle’s native Danish with just the first two translated into English.

The narrator, Tara Selter, is caught in a time loop, reliving November 28th over and over again. It’s Groundhog’s Day but with an existential slant on the meaning of self, time, mortality, sustainability, and the inevitable progression of love and marriage.

The science fiction involved with being stuck in a time loop takes a back seat to these serious questions, often in a rhythmic, repetitive style. The plot is thin for most of the novel as the narrator explores an existence devoid of change and together yet split apart from the one she loves.

This first book piqued my curiosity enough that I will certainly continue the series with Book II. I hope a few of my lingering questions will be answered in time.

Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney

June 27, 2025 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

I didn’t like this book at first. I felt claustrophobic, there in the first chapter, squeezed in at the kids’ table surrounded by a large group of strangers at a Manhattan apartment dinner party. These guests were too witty, overly confident, and entirely full of themselves. Who talks like this? And more pressing, who would want to read an entire novel with these assholes?

But I persevered. In fact, it was the Manhattan setting of this book that initially drew me. I lived in New York in the mid-1990s and recently returned to an apartment on the Upper East Side, where much of the story takes place. McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, helped to convince me to move to New York when I read it in college. The descriptions of the city, its magic, and absurdity were spellbinding. The city itself becomes a character in the story, which we follow over a year, from the bitter cold of winter through the languor of summer to the bracing beauty of fall.

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A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

April 24, 2025 / Literary Fiction, Reading

A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.

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Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

March 28, 2025 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

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James by Percival Everett

December 30, 2024 / Literary Fiction, Reading

An innovative retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. There are some brutal, hopeless sections of this book that gutted me. There is some humor, but mostly this is a dark, dark book. The ending of vengeance and violence doesn’t feel consistent with Jim’s character, but a man can take only so much.

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

November 3, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Stegner must be my spirit author. The Big Rock Candy Mountain affected me on a deeply emotional level because of the many similiaries from my own life that that novel explores. This one touched me as well, but for diffrent reasons. The narrator is 69, retired to his dream home in California, and deeply unhappy. He looks back on his life as pointless, a spectator.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark.

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How to Read a Book by Monica Wood

September 20, 2024 / Literary Fiction, Reading

A fun, palate-cleansing read.

Themes: living with your mistakes and regrets, starting over. It’s never too late to begin again on your own terms. Also: how awful family can be. How awful people in power treat their subjects. The ending was jolting, but comforting in a way.

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Table for Two by Amor Towles

September 7, 2024 / Literary Fiction, Reading

I’ll read anything that Amor Towles writes. He’s one of my favorite living writers. This collection of six short stories and a novella hit the mark, though each left me wanting more, to know happens next. A master storyteller.

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

August 26, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

I loved everything about this book. Who knew it was possible to write a novel filled with intricate chess games and make them exciting?! Consider this:

She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

August 18, 2024 / Literary Fiction, Reading

The New York Times listed this book at the best novel of the 21st century (so far). I decided to hold off reading it until I had read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens as this book is a loose retelling of that story. That was probably a mistake.

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