Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out is as much about the role of the athlete, particularly the baseball “star,” as it is about what makes a team function—and what threatens the unity of a team. The play confronts the disturbing truth that baseball has … [Read more...]
Stars, Salt & Sparrows: A Review of Ted Kooser’s “Splitting An Order”
Splitting An Order by Ted Kooser / Copper Canyon Press / 2014 / 84 pages / 978-1556594694 Overview The light of Ted Kooser is the everyday. To most of us these moments disappear, without recognition, without change, without endurance. Whether caught … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Last First Day: A Novel
The Last First Day: A Novel by Carrie Brown / Pantheon / 304 pages / 978-0307908032 Carrie Brown’s prose sucks you into a kind of lull. Images of rooms without bodies, twilights in small towns, or people caught in states of pause and repose are … [Read more...]
The Curse of the Blinding Worm. A close look at ‘Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook and Me’, by Malcolm McNeill
Colin Wilson read this extraordinary book at a single sitting. He can’t have been an exception. Malcolm McNeill’s Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook and Me sweeps you up into a multi-layered adventure that presses almost every button: it’s … [Read more...]
A Review of Joseph Ridgwell’s Cuba: In Search of Hemingway
Turning the first page on the handsewn binding of Joseph Ridgwell’s Cuba: In Search of Hemingway feels like something special. Like discovering the splintered edges of a treasure chest through sand. Or something you might unexpectedly luck on at the … [Read more...]
Book Review – Alex Preston’s In Love and War.
In Love and War is the third novel from Alex Preston, following 2010's This Bleeding City – which won The Edinburgh International Book Festival Readers’ First Book Award, and was chosen as one of Waterstones’ New Voices of 2010 – and its follow-up, The … [Read more...]
Book Review – Vacant Lot by Oliver Rohe (trans. Laird Hunt)
Vacant Lot by Oliver Rohe, translated by Laird Hunt. Counterpath Press, 2011. “Then I was king and now I’m no more than a ghost,” says the narrator in Oliver Rohe’s novel Vacant Lot. Now “I pass haggardly through trenches at the periphery of agitation … [Read more...]
Book Review: Henry Miller: Ahead of the Game by Kenton Crowther
Kenton Crowther's 3100-word essay, Henry Miller: Ahead of the Game has just become available in digital form. In it, Crowther shines a little light on Miller as a writer and as a man, exploring his life, sensibilities, and ongoing relevance. It's not … [Read more...]
“The Invention of the Past”: An essay on the novel Ancient Light by John Banville
When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cleave first catches sight of Mrs. Gray – the mother of his best friend – what he sees is a reflection of a reflection. As he waits in the hallway of her house, he sees her naked, “not nude”, in the full-length mirror fixed … [Read more...]
Paul Maher Jr. considers Kerouac’s Haunted Life
The Haunted Life and Other Writings / Da Capo Press / March 11, 2014 / 208 pp. Seventy years ago, in May 1944, Jack Kerouac toiled over a novella-length work set in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was written at the prompting of his two newest friends, the … [Read more...]
Book review – The Book of Duels by Michael Garriga
The Book of Duels by Michael Garriga / Milkweed / 2014 / ISBN: 9781571310934 Code Duello; or, How an Author Teaches You to Die, Rise, and be Born Again He greets you with a sly smile and a twinkle of the eyes that suggests mischief, leans into you … [Read more...]
Kerouac Before the Jazz: a review of “The Haunted Life”
There are some great lost manuscripts in American literature and some are truly lost. Ernest Hemingway famously lost the only draft of the first short stories he ever wrote on a French train. Most writers have "lost" manuscripts, conspicuously placed in … [Read more...]
The Novel as History: An essay on the book Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow
The novel Homer and Langley is part history and part fiction: a distinction without a difference within its pages. Doctorow has gained a reputation for taking considerable liberties with recorded history, for frequently transgressing the boundaries … [Read more...]
Liberty Ltd.: Trespassers Prosecuted – A Review of Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai
Liberty Limited is a collection of poems of great passion and compassion, of wonders and shame, of bodies and souls. It is a voice for and about the voiceless, for and about those who used to have some limited liberty, but who have lost it long ago: … [Read more...]
Book Review – IR 30: Indigenous Visions In Dub
I guess it's appropriate that blockades have gone up again on the Tyndengia Mohawk reservation in South Eastern Ontario Canada as I begin to write this review. Here in Canada the First Nations people are usually out of sight and out of mind unless they … [Read more...]
The Opening Line – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." And so begins the first sentence to Hunter S. Thompson's seminal 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American … [Read more...]
beyond the ghosts: poems by t. kilgore splake
beyond the ghosts: poems by t. kilgore splake / Presa Press / PO Box 792, Rockford MI 49341 / 35 pages / $6.00 The author provided a copy to Empty Mirror, with no expectation of review. t. kilgore splake knows how to draw an evocative picture … [Read more...]
Book Review – Dreams before Extinction by Naeemeh Naeemaei
It's hard for us in the West not to have misconceptions of what life is like in countries where our perceptions are shaped entirely by what we read in the media. This is especially true of those countries which have attempted to isolate themselves and … [Read more...]
Book Review – The Silence Before the Whisper Comes by Bruce Kauffman
Why would anyone write poetry? It's not what you'd call glamourous. You're never going to make money at it. The best you can hope for is if you manage to publish a few books of poems you could possibly get picked up by some university to teach a creative … [Read more...]
Opacity: Liminal Landmine-Bodies – the foreword to Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai
Liberty Limited by Károly Sándor Pallai / Éditions Arthée / 2013 / ISBN: 9789993184638 One of my most despondent memories relates to my first encounter with “Mother Country” France, where it was distressingly tacit that I am “other” than French, … [Read more...]