Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Vanessa Blakeslee
In this enthralling debut collection, winner of the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, E. J. Levy delves into the well-trod territory of modern love, in all its indecisiveness and heartbreak. Levy’s fiction and essays have received numerous honors such as the Pushcart Prize and Nelson Algren Award, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for her anthology, Tasting Life Twice:... more
Reviewed by:
Micah Bateman
“... And Lord the sound of their wings / is the sound of the leaves...”—Shane McCrae, from “Crows,” Mule THE WAY THINGS WORKis by admitting or opening away. This is the simplest form of current [...] The way things work is by solution, resistance lessened or increased and taken advantage of. The way things work is that finally we believe they are there, common and able to illustrate... more
Reviewed by:
Erik Martiny
Louis Armand is a visual and literary artist based in the Czech Republic. He is most known for his text-and-sculpture installation The Megaphones of Prague, an ongoing project launched in 1996 that collects and modifies historical megaphones still left in the suburbs of Prague. These instruments of control are sometimes left intact as dictatorial “flowers of evil”; at other times, they... more
Reviewed by:
Kevin Haworth
Why isn’t Brian Doyle famous? After all, these are boom times for essayists, relatively speaking. Nonfiction abounds on publishers’ lists, everything from traditional memoirs to lyric essay collections to ruminations on place to chronicles of living for a year on home-raised mushrooms or with a biblical beard. And creative nonfiction features in almost every literary journal now, expanding the... more
Reviewed by:
Nathan Huffstutter
In his 2000 debut, Mountain City, author Gregory Martin surveys his mother’s deeply-rooted family tree, reticulating the fates of aging relatives and a faded frontier town to assay “how a thing can persist against a seemingly irrevocable will for it to die.” Martin’s follow-up, Stories for Boys, springs from a frantic 2007 phone call: the writer’s 66-year-old father has just... more
