Fiction — Literary Fiction

The Divorce

he Divorce makes it pretty clear that Bea and Niklas do not belong together, and the specifics of that conclusion is my one real qualm about the story. I would have preferred a less clear, and thus perhaps less clichéd, presentation of Jacob—Bea’s sibling and Niklas’ erstwhile best friend—whose suicide was the meetcute for our future divorcees. They both come with intense baggage: Bea with her unmoored loneliness and Niklas with his self-abnegating sense of duty, gloming together into a pair unsuited to support each other in any way other than through conventional familial bonds.

David DinaburgNovember 29, 2024Fiction, Dual Perspectives, Marriage

What you are looking for is in the library

What you are looking for is in the library falls directly into the path of “cozy” by way of social-structural integration. It is a delightful collection of interdependent stories, each one focusing on a character that “betters” themself through a quirky recommendation from an insightful buddha-esque librarian:

"Is being a sales assistant in a department store really not such a great job?”
I don’t know what to say. Ms. Komachi waits patiently for my reply.
“Well, I mean…Anybody can do it. It’s not like its was my dream job or anything I desperately wanted to do. I just kind of fell into it. But I live on my own, so I have to work to support myself.”

Each chapter, I found myself rooting for the character to find happiness. Each time, they did. The book is joyful, within the metes and bounds of proscriptive, achievable success. It is formalistic in a non-derogatory sense of that word: in the library overflows with comfortable and expected rhythms.

David DinaburgJanuary 3, 2024cozy, library, Fiction, Japan

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

A wish fulfilled for fiction lovers–unlimited time with unlimited books. Outside of that singular moment with the spooky TV, I was never again outside of the pages; the book completely, and seemingly effortlessly, brought me into someone else’s life. Even though nothing particularly profound seemed to happen, the experience was pleasant enough.

David DinaburgNovember 9, 2023Fiction, Japan, Bookstore

Y/N

It lives in the beat between being graced with a haphazard “Be careful” and having the speaker finish the injunction, with specificity, clarifying of what one should be careful. You, the reader, are made aware something requires attention but are left to wonder whether it is simply the entire world of which one must be wary.

In thrall to the same lack of specificity that can shade a child’s world in unknowable and constant danger, the book opens with its title: here there are details of a subculture to be gleaned, but if you, like me, are a relative child within the genre, its signifier will land without even signifying that it is a genre’d work:

David DinaburgAugust 11, 2023Fiction, kpop, fandom, void

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

That’s sort of the theme of this book– “I dunno” with a mild shrug. I liked all the people. They’re likable. The villain is comically despicable so no one cares that he’s dead. Vera herself…oh boy, somebody put their finger on it. She’s a treat. Who doesn’t love a bossy, nosy old lady? More Vera Wong in more books, please. But aside from being a vehicle for platforming Vera, there’s not a lot I cared about here. The plot felt secondary to Vera being Vera.

David DinaburgJune 21, 2023Fiction, Mystery, San Francisco

Fake Accounts

Imagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.

“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?

Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.

David DinaburgAugust 1, 2022Fiction, New York, Berlin

A Girl Goes into the Forest

There is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.

David DinaburgFebruary 6, 2022Fiction, Short Stories