Book Reviews

Reviewed by:
Andrew J. Khaled Madigan
The stories of Ry Cooder are a lot like his music: stately, precise, well constructed; they grab you by the throat, quietly, and never let go.Guitarist, singer, songwriter, producer, and composer, Ryland Peter Cooder has been making music since the 1960s, but Los Angeles Stories is his first collection of fiction. Spanning the years 1940 to 1958, these stories are not grandiose,... more
Reviewed by:
Christopher Prewitt
When one reads Eklund’s poetry, one draws comparisons to Péret with his figurative, associative language, especially as it pertains to Eklund’s metaphors, which at times can also bring to mind García Lorca. From the poem “Burning Milk”:We’d yet to see a whole city burnOnly waiting for what would leakFrom the big eggs of our ideas,From the palm of a broken handNailed to the sky.What sets Eklund’s... more
Reviewed by:
Ben Mauk
Geoff Dyer draws no distinction between a work of art—a book, a film, a photograph—and his own encounter with it. He may be congenitally unable to distance the object of his critical attention from its relationship to his personal history, or else just unwilling. But to read Dyer is to have a conversation about art with a fiercely intelligent yet deeply self-involved friend.Obversely, Dyer seems... more
Reviewed by:
A. Naomi Jackson
Binyavanga Wainana’s fantastic new book, One Day I Will Write About This Place explodes the boundaries of memoir and our notions of what it means to be a contemporary African. The book is part travelogue, part coming-of-age story, part African geopolitical history, but really in the end a tale about how its author became a writer. The story is told through dispatches from a particular... more
Reviewed by:
TaraShea Nesbit
The title of Jenny Boully’s new book—Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Towards Them—gets its name from a section of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy: “Of course she should have roused the children at once; not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them, but because it was no longer good for them to sleep on a rock grown chilly." This new book... more

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