Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Ethan Madore
There’s a scene in Mike Scalise’s The Brand New Catastrophe where Scalise, twentysomething and struggling to find full-time work in New York City, arrives in Central Park for a job interview. In short, it’s a catastrophe. Scalise, having spent days imagining this job—and its benefits package—as his last chance, a final lifeline into honorable employment and actual health insurance,... more
Reviewed by:
Eric Farwell
With Jonathan Safran Foer’s gritty new novel, Here I Am, it’s hard not to read it in the context of his recent public divorce. The 571-page work deals with a nearly middle-aged Jewish couple who are drifting apart and going through the motions of separation. The book does its best to account for small moments that keep a marriage together or destroy it, articulating both how invisible... more
Reviewed by:
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Max and I were first introduced to each other in 2015 and immediately bonded through a series of ensuing e-mail and text correspondences—usually about poetry, but also about painting, glass blowing, and balloon races, among other things. In addition to this more casual exchange, I read and gave Max editorial feedback on early versions of Four Reincarnations. Indeed, I loved... more
Reviewed by:
Davy Knittle
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby MoonlightAli Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight (Flood Editions, 2015) is a verse narrative focused on Ruby, an Aboriginal teenager, whose family is killed by white settlers in a late-nineteenth-century attack. Most of the poems follow Ruby after the massacre, as she meets and falls in love with Jack, a white fur trapper, and as she negotiates the... more
Reviewed by:
Frances Cannon
John D’Agata is a champion of the essay, a crusader for lost forms, a defender of nonfiction as an art. The recent publication of The Making of the American Essay, the third volume in D’Agata’s essay-anthology trilogy, shifts his position from expert to shaper; through his curation and introductions to these essays, D’Agata proves himself to be not only a scholar and proponent... more
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Reviewed by:
Jennifer Bowen Hicks
God Bless America could almost be read as thirteen irreverent prayers: Dear [Whomever]: save us from our smallness. But no prayer will make you laugh the way Steve Almond does with his newest collection of stories, one of which was included in America’s Best, another in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In Almond’s America, parents and children, TSA agents and smart-mouthed... more
Reviewed by:
Theodore Wheeler
In his convincing debut collection of short fiction, Quarantine (Harper Perennial 2011), Rahul Mehta chronicles the lives of openly gay Indian-American men, their disappointments and betrayals, and the hard-earned personal connections they come to cherish. In an intimate, confessional style, Mehta’s characters dwell on botched relationships, on their romantic, familial, and cultural... more
Reviewed by:
Jack Smith
“Wisniewski shows a shrewd hand with sparkling dialogue,” said Publishers Weekly of All Weekend with the Lights On, Mark Wisniewski’s 2001 collection of short fiction, and while this assessment is certainly true, Wisniewski’s deeply engaging prose style also owes much to the author's incisive wit and subtle irony. Combining the best of literary forebears Twain and Hemingway,... more
Reviewed by:
David Frederick Thomas
Following the publication last August of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, there has been much debate concerning the merits of big, Dickensian works. The underlying question is simple: can rather traditional novels continue to do new and exciting things? Benjamin Hale’s debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, is just such a work; and, in short, the answer is yes. Here’s the premise... more
Reviewed by:
David Duhr
Restraint is hard to come by in Las Vegas; just go to any gate at McCarron International and people-watch. Today’s bright-eyed passengers surging from the jetway, filled with the certainty that their big score is just over the horizon, are tomorrow’s dead-eyed downtrodden, shame and humiliation blanketing their faces, some of their innocence chipped away. It’s not easy to leave Sin City with your... more
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Reviewed by:
Claudia Cortese
A child gives her doll a spirit, a personality, a story. She constructs a narrative for her doll, filling an inanimate object with life. This imaginative process is one we often associate with girlhood. A constellation of images orbits the word “doll”: wooden dollhouses and porcelain girls in lace dresses and dolls that pee and dolls that cry and dolls that girls push in strollers. However, dolls—which are believed to be the first toys—have not... more
Reviewed by:
Chris Pusateri
I often think that I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Among those poets working today, Jane Lewty is one who possesses qualities usually ascribed to visual artists. Her debut volume of poetry, Bravura Cool, imports the movements of the gestural into a textual space, and in doing so, reinvents the age-old dictum that there can be “no ideas but in things.”The things of Lewty’s poetry are things in motion, and like humans... more
Reviewed by:
Maggie Millner
Anna Journey’s second book takes its name from an exhibit at L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology called “Vulgar Remedies: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.” The exhibit comprises folk cures and rituals predating modern medicine; the poetry collection features hypnotic fabulations on memory, fauna, and the body. At times tender and anecdotal, others grotesque and nightmarish, Vulgar Remedies explores the boundaries that... more
Reviewed by:
Carolyne Wright
In this volume of thoughtful, reflective, lyric-narrative poems, David Rigsbee's deep psychic engagement with perception, memory, culture, and the politics of human interaction, in all their expansiveness and limitation, is on full display. The poet's sensibility—guided by compassionate reflection and seared by loss—discovers its way forward through the inland waterways of memory to reach for difficult epiphanies. Lyric immediacy alternates with... more
Reviewed by:
Will Vincent
Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds performs the opening lines of Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror in reverse, where rather than threatening to have our souls dissolved as “water does sugar” by the text itself, Ward’s book lands like a Lautréamontian crane on our brilliantine post-modern marsh. Floating above and aware of an avant-garde still obsessed with signs signifying signs signifying signs and... more
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Reviewed by:
Amanda Dambrink
“A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires.” —Alexander Smith, “On the Writing of Essays”So begins the first of eleven personal essays in Patrick Madden’s premiere collection, Quotidiana, and the truth of this statement comes to bear on the entire book. Here the author brings... more
Reviewed by:
Matthew Clark
To gauge a writer, one might consider his or her ability to transform something ostensibly banal, like chalk, ordinary blackboard chalk, ordinary calcium carbonate, ordinary grape-growing stuff, into something interesting. Unsurprisingly, to read John McPhee’s most recent collection of essays, Silk Parachute, is to marvel at the way he elicits a temperament the opposite of boredom. “... more
