Author: D. A. Hosek
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2025 Tournament of Books: The Extinction of Irena Rey vs. Margo’s Got Money Troubles/The Wedding People
The official match-up this round is an easy choice for me. I found the formal experimentation of Margo’s Got Money Troubles to be intrusive and irritating while the formal experimentation of The Extinction of Irena Rey seemed delightful to me. It seems an easy choice to advance The Extinction of Irena Rey. Meanwhile in a parallel universe If…
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2025 Tournament of Books: James vs. Martyr!
I kind of feel like there is only one book that comes close to meeting James in terms of excellence and lasting impact out of the books of 2024, and that’s Martyr! but at the same time, I also feel like this it’s mostly because of the promise that Martyr! shows for Akbar’s oeuvre going forward, so for…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Liars/The Wedding People vs. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The one match of the quarterfinals where I did not successfully choose the matchup, thanks to Liars getting the nod over The Wedding People. So in the real-life matchup, we have Liars over Margo’s Got Money Troubles and while Margo has occasional issues with its structure, it at least didn’t feel like a giant lump of undigested autobiography like Liars did,…
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2025 Tournament of Books: The History of Sound vs. The Extinction of Irena Rey
Another quarterfinals match-up where it’s books I’ve picked to advance, sparing me the trip to the alternate universe. This time it’s The History of Sound vs The Extinction of Irena Rey. This is perhaps the toughest match-up for me to pick a winner on. Both books are excellent and flawed in their own ways. It’s almost a…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Martyr! vs. Beautyland
Today’s matchup gives us a pair of weird literary novels, each weird in their own way and they were both books that I loved, so it made for a difficult choice. I think, though, that Akbar’s prose was just a touch more to my delight even if the coincidence central to the plot was maybe…
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2025 Tournamet of Books: James vs. Headshot/The Book of Love
We come into the quarterfinals and this particular match-up is one for which my choice is foreordained. James is the best book of 2024, end of discussion. And yet I suppose I should discuss. Headshot certainly has its fans, but while it has aspects I can admire, it didn’t manage to continually suprise and amaze in…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Margo’s Got Money Troubles vs. Someone Like Us
The last of the first-round matchups (which means that after this, my write-ups get a lot shorter since I’ll have already said my piece on each of the books). On the one hand, we have Margo’s Got Money Troubles, one of those easy to describe books: A college student who has become pregnant after having an…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Liars/The Wedding People vs. The Book of George
Today brings the first of the counterfactual matchups in my commentary since Hannah Pearl Utt inexplicably chose Liars to advance from the play-in round. So let me talk about The Book of George. This book hits a lot of the same sort of notes that Liars does from a hapless man failing at relationships. But unlike Liars, the focus…
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2025 Tournament of Books: Colored Television vs. The Extinction of Irena Rey
Today’s pair of novels is another wildly disparate pairing. Danzy Senna’s Colored Television is a realist portrayal of a novelist and low-ranking academic tempted into television writing, albeit on spec with a producer of dubious motivation. The sole bit of surrealism is when Senna and her family move into a retirement home towards the end of…