On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong / Penguin Press / 978-0525562023 / June 4, 2019Susurros a mi Padre by Erick Sáenz / The Operating System / 978-1946031259 / July 15, 2018 Early in Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the poet pauses to reflect on Barthes: No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the … [Read more...]
Shiny Dark Mind Candy: Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory, reviewed by Laura Morgan
Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory / 404 Ink / 978-1912489022 / 208 pages There are seas where the dead lie so thick they are pressed into a layer of silt the colour of yoghurt that sits at the bottom, under all that water, waiting to be churned up briefly by the fall of the next shipwrecked boat. Scottish author Helen McClory is the winner of a Saltire Book Award and a … [Read more...]
Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure: Tradition and the Talented Individual
In 1944, Jean Stafford published her first novel, Boston Adventure, a book which became an unexpected best seller..1 From the start, it was an anomaly, "the book that Stafford wrote before one would have expected her to be able to or inclined to" (Hulbert 229). Its unusual qualities have failed to satisfy any person thoroughly, it seems. Perhaps one of Boston Adventure's … [Read more...]
Please Find Us by Wendy Oleson, reviewed by Sarah Wiggers
Please Find Us by Wendy Oleson / Gertrude Press / 47 pages / 2017 Please Find Us contains thirteen stories of survival. In the fifty-page chapbook, Oleson’s carefully crafted characters struggle to understand their places in the world. They find themselves in a variety of situations (mourning the loss of loved ones, ostracized from society, coping with dysfunctional … [Read more...]
Apocalyptic Language: Reading Brooks Rexroat’s Thrift Store Coats
Thrift Store Coats by Brooks Rexroat / Orson's Publishing / 978-0991446391 Brooks Rexroat’s debut short story collection, Thrift Store Coats explores the harsh and often unforgiving landscape of the Midwestern United States. Across these twelve stories, his work examines the way that place changes people, how it shapes them, and what that means for their day-to-day lives. … [Read more...]
Aching for Meaning: The Work of Novelist Rosamond Lehmann
I read about Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer years before I was able to locate a copy of the novel. Yet just from reading a short synopsis and critique, I was predisposed to love it, this story that critic Alfred Noyes claimed "might have been written by Keats"---if Keats had, you know, been a young, unhappily married woman living and writing in 1920s England. Devoured on first … [Read more...]
Tasha Coryell’s Hungry People reviewed by Kelly Flynn
Hungry People by Tasha Coryell / Split Lip Press / 978-1721553457 / 212 pages / August 3, 2018 On the cover of Tasha Coryell’s debut short story collection, Hungry People, a bright, monochromatic pink ice cream cone has fallen to the floor and is melting. It is a sloppy, but beautiful mess. This image is much like the characters in the book, all deeply … [Read more...]
Nona Caspers’ The Fifth Woman, reviewed by Noah Sanders
The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers / Sarabande Books / 160 pages / 978-1946448170 / August 14, 2018 The death central to Nona Casper’s incredible new book, The Fifth Woman (Sarabande Books), happens within pages of the book starting. Michelle, the live-in girlfriend of the book’s unnamed narrator, is hit by a car while riding her bike to work and dies in the ambulance on the … [Read more...]
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, reviewed by Michael Welch
A Lucky Man by Graywolf Press / 978-1555978051 / hardcover / May 1, 2018 In his debut short story collection, A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley traces the arch of fractured masculinity through the lives of nine black men, ranging from the precipice of puberty to the dimming lights of youth. At first glance, Brinkley’s characters appear to stand and stumble as they try to attain … [Read more...]
Writers on Writers on Writers I: Linda Chown on E.L. Doctorow on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
This is the first of a series of short essays. These reviews will interpret writers interpreting each other. This first one specifically addresses what I think E.L Doctorow does with Hemingway and Faulkner in his reading of Faulkner’s tremendously interpretable novel, As I Lay Dying. All writing here is my own except where otherwise quoted. I will step in parenthesis to make my … [Read more...]
Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, reviewed by Ryan Kim
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang / Lenny (Random House) / 320 pages / 0399589386 / August 1, 2017 In “My Days and Nights of Terror,” Mande, a Chinese immigrant, is made fun of by Korean classmates for her accent. The self-hatred is both ironic and hypocritical, evident in Mande’s fellow immigrants and herself. “No one had it in them to have a heart for anyone, not even … [Read more...]
Marc Olmsted reviews Dime Bag: Stories 1978–1986 by Vincent Zangrillo
Dime Bag: Stories 1978–1986 by Vincent Zangrillo / Sensitive Skin Press / paperback / 978-1545465004 There are two main differences to Vincent Zangrillo's account, Dime Bag, from the usual down-and-out- drug tale --- first, his "language," his voice, which has the natural speech of the street as well as his own intelligence nailed down to the point that we hear him talking … [Read more...]
Book Review – Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares
Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares, translated by Jennifer Donovan / Les Figues Press / June 2017 / 978-1-934254-65-3 / 144 pages / softcover The level of degradation to which Gabriela Torres Olivares’ characters sink may be so grotesque, daresay unspeakable, that to put a name to their collective experience undoubtedly required a new word. Thus we get the title of … [Read more...]
Book Review – Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
John Darnielle is already something of a big deal. As frontman and creative driving force for alt-rock cult figures The Mountain Goats, Darnielle has been crafting beguiling pop lyrics for approaching three decades, garnering major praise for the depth and deftness of his song-writing. The Mountain Goats’ songs tackle big themes, they are linked together in tracks and cycles, … [Read more...]
Book Review: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster / Henry Holt and Co. / 2017 / 880 pages / ISBN: 978-1627794466 It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Paul Auster – a writer known for brevity and concision, at least most of the time – re-emerges with his first novel in seven years and presents us with this; a doorstop wedge of a tome which intimidates with its physicality before the reader has even … [Read more...]
Book review: Kara Vernor’s Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song
Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song by Kara Vernor / Split Lip Press / 75 pages / ISBN: 978-0-9909035-7-4 "… this is what boys did to girls" My dad used to say there were two ways to enter the sea: you walk in slowly, bracing yourself against the cold. Or you run and dive and before you know it there's seaweed in your hair and your mouth is full of salt. You're in … [Read more...]
Book Review – Generation Hex: David Noone’s novella, Saint of the City
Saint of the City by David Noone, introduced by Cathi Unsworth / Murder Slim Press / March 2017 Lunging forwards with a series of rapid-fire blows to the gut masquerading as chapters, Saint of the City, the debut novella by David Noone, pulls no punches as it hurtles by in bare-knuckle women-and-wine confessional mode before departing along its own warped trajectory, … [Read more...]
Steve Aylett is Creative People’s Drug of Choice
The following is a modified version of the first essay in Steve Aylett: A Critical Anthology (Sein und Werden, 2016), in which various authors discuss and analyze the work of Steve Aylett. The anthology is edited by Bill Ectric and D. Harlan Wilson. As more people find out what UK author Steve Aylett is all about, loyal cult following may yet explode into full-fledged … [Read more...]
Book Review – Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle
Known more for fantasy and children’s books, William Kotzwinkle made his name with novelizations of hit movies like E.T: The Extra Terrestrial. His forays into more serious fiction are often ignored, but his novella Swimmer in the Secret Sea deserves a closer look. It is a beautifully written but harsh examination of the ways in which we create meaning for ourselves in a … [Read more...]
Book Review – Stranger Days: A Novel by Rachel Kendall
Hemingway praised Paris as “a movable feast.” Henry James, in his preface to the 1903 edition of The Ambassadors, described a cliché that may or may not be true. He said “the moral scheme breaks down in Paris” and that “hundreds of thousands of…persons annually visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe.” This cliché presents a challenge. An author who writes … [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 palpable in quiet fluidity. You feel transported to a safe place, as though fear has been exiled, excluded, forgotten. 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 and take refuge in a penumbra that is menaced from all sides.” Translated from the French by novelist Laird Hunt, at its … [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 to the outside of her bedroom door. It is only a reflection of her image caught in the mirrors of the three-paneled dressing … [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 like a conspirator while shuffling you toward a scarlet cooler in the middle of the room, and whispers, “Grab a beer. … [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 between fact and fiction. For him, all purely historical explanations of the past have proved inadequate, as they do not account … [Read more...]
Book Review: Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation)
Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation) by Tim Manley / Penguin Books / 2013 / 978-0143124795 / 272 pages "Curiouser and curiouser" was Alice's commentary on the world she found down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carol's Alice In Wonderland. While the land she found herself in was populated by hookah smoking caterpillars, pocket watch bearing white … [Read more...]
Review – An Invisible Flower by Yoko Ono
An Invisible Flower by Yoko Ono / Chronicle Books / 52 pages / 978-1452109114 An Invisible Flower was written and illustrated by nineteeen-year-old Yoko Ono, years before she met John Lennon, or became a public figure. It is the tale of a girl who sees a flower that no one else can see. Finally, she meets a man, "Smelty John," who can see the flower, too. It carries with … [Read more...]
Book Review – Time Adjusters & Other Stories by Bill Ectric
The modern fables that make up Bill Ectric's new collection of stories, Time Adjusters, are difficult to classify, in the best way possible. They seem a comic-book mishmash of science fiction and magical realism, one turn of the screw toward another world. At first, the author paints a suburban landscape where pet baboons chase children through the streets, and we are not sure … [Read more...]
Tamper by Bill Ectric, reviewed by Eric D. Lehman
Tamper, the new book by Bill Ectric, frames itself as a boy named Whit's effort to comprehend his past. Did he have a prophetic dream about a bag of bones on the side of the road? Did his friend Paul Clemmons really disappear in a pile of leaves, never to emerge? It is not at all clear. What is clear is that Whit and his friend Roger live on the border of what we would call … [Read more...]
