This short, final part of my TWIRecap catch-up. I liked them all, but the book I really had the most to say about got a full review (if you missed me discussing Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, I think it’s great!).

Savages (Don Winslow, 2015)
Savages and Little Eyes were back-to-back selections for the Jeselnik Book Club, and he really is just picking banger after banger (this month’s is The Glass Hotel, which is the first one I’ve actually read already and is also great). Savages has probably the most in-your-face opening of any book I’ve read, a chapter with only two words: “Fuck you.”

The writing here is efficient, containing all the details you need and basically zero you don’t. Which is nice, tbh, because this tale of two dudes who take on a cartel in order to save the woman they’re both sleeping with could absolutely have been some lengthy slog that gets caught up in all sorts of minutiae but Don Winslow doesn’t care about any of that. He wants to tell you a story about people having sex, doing drugs, and blowing shit up, and that’s precisely what he does and it’s just a good gosh dang time.

Good and Evil and Other Stories (Samanta Schweblin via Megan McDowell, 2025) 
I picked this up basically as soon as I put Little Eyes down. Having noted that her roots in writing short stories comes across in the structure of that other book, I was excited to see what she was really like in that element… and while I definitely enjoyed it while I was reading it, I don’t think my brain likes main-lining story collections, because a couple weeks out I had forgotten the premises of basically every story; it was only when I went back to a synopsis that I was like “Oh yeah, that story about the mom who failed to kill herself and then just had to, like, go about her day was really compelling.”

All of the stories reflect that same ability to speak from the unexpected perspective and not pull any punches in the depictions. I will definitely read the rest of Schweblin’s work… but I think I’ll do the next one a bit more leisurely so I can actually, ya know, digest what I’m reading.

Faces in the Crowd (Valeria Luiselli via Christina MacSweeney, 2011)
Faces in the Crowd is the most formally challenging book I’ve read in a while.

It (kind of) follows a novelist who is writing a book about her own life in New York (hey! that’s where I live), but the things we are reading seem to mostly be from the book which is maybe fictional because sometimes we break out of the book she’s writing so she can comment on the contents of the book… and then she becomes obsesed with a poet who had lived in New York a century before so she starts writing a book about him and of course we read a bunch of that also… and there are no chapters delineating which timeline or reality you’re in; anytime you see symbols between paragraphs, it means you’re switching somewhere and you won’t know until you’re in it who and what and where you are. And as the book progresses, the lines between the stories melt away into some assuredly metaphorical conclusion that I just can’t totally wrap my mind around based on just this one reading.

And so I probably should give it another go because I found the structure really compelling and there’s a lot of little details that I expect I would understand more on that second go… but I also know myself and I’m just not going to do that.

So that’s a shame.