Book Reviews
Reviewed by:
Maggie Anderson
A walking stick, a club, dirty laundry, boxes, a skillet, a sword, a spoon—can such everyday objects tell us secrets or foretell our future? Can they feel pain or act immorally? How much of us can our things hold, and how much of them can we absorb? “We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist,” wrote the French philosopher... more
Reviewed by:
Kerry Hillis Goff
Years ago, when I read William Carlos Williams’s collection of poems Spring and All (1923), it was the first time I experienced a poet who tried to teach people how to read his poetry in his poetry. “So much depends” is the center argument of his book-length tutorial:so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the whitechickens Pretty much, if any one of... more
Reviewed by:
Ian Faith
If you’ve been paying attention to video games at all over the last decade, you know that writing has become an integral part of the medium. Nearly every game from independent to big budget “triple A” studios, features some type of narrative, if only to justify its own mechanics. Although subject to skepticism by gamer culture, games within the so-called walking simulators genre like Gone... more
Reviewed by:
Jack Smith
Author of two novels and story collections, Christine Sneed is a master of short as well as long fiction. It’s the inner spaces where Sneed truly excels, with a riveting prose style that captures the depths of her characters’ thoughts, feelings, and conflicted selves. The stories that make up her most recent collection The Virginity of Famous Men reveal an extraordinary range of types.... more
Reviewed by:
Nicole Banas
In 2000, the U.S. government granted political asylum to almost 4,000 unaccompanied minors from South Sudan. These so-called “lost boys” had survived deadly fighting between the Sudanese government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army during the country’s second civil war. Many had walked thousands of miles, seeking shelter in Ethiopia before being expelled back to Sudan or to refugee camps... more
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Reviewed by:
Zach Savich
Near the end of Alex Kovacs’s charming and eclectic first novel, The Currency of Paper, hero Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth converts a warehouse in East London into the Museum of Contemporary Life. Like many of Maximilian’s public artworks, the Museum attempts to inspire cultural insight through its presentation of ephemera: here you will finds objects ordinary (“umbrella racks,... more
Reviewed by:
Anika Gupta
In this engaging debut collection of short stories, L. Annette Binder probes the psyches not of heroes, but of monsters, turning the lens of the fairy tale on itself. When I first read the list of story titles, heavy with allusions—Galatea, Nod—I was afraid of finding myself in the well-trod territory of the reinvented Grimm tale. But Binder’s collection is unusual in the way it straddles the... more
Reviewed by:
Mike Broida
In the small slice of Nordic literature that’s recently made its way to America, it’s hard to find any that’s escaped the broad, posthumous influence of Stieg Larsson. For that alone, Bergsveinn Birgisson’s A Reply to a Letter from Helga, translated by Philip Roughton (AmazonCrossing, January 2013) is a noteworthy addition to the Anglophone lexicon, bringing with it a brief and vibrant... more
Reviewed by:
Alex Flesher
In Steve Tomasula’s geographically ambiguous locale called OZ, there are no yellow-brick roads, no munchkins, and no witches, wicked or otherwise. Perhaps more frightening than cackling hags, though, there are “connoisseurs” of elevator music. In OZ, Vanilla is called “Crema de Las Angelitas,” and all books are “devoted to the beauty of Auto.” The counterpart locale in this dystopian world is... more
Reviewed by:
Jack Smith
Robert Garner McBrearty has authored two previous collections, A Night at the Y and Episode, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. In this third collection, published by Conundrum Press, McBrearty continues to prove himself a master storyteller.His stories tend to be about isolated people hacking it out, doing their best to feel upbeat about things,... more
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Reviewed by:
Laura Madeline Wiseman
Kristina Marie Darling’s new book The Sun & The Moon takes up the metaphor of celestial bodies to contemplate the movement of the bodies of two lovers as they move through the space of their lives. To illustrate the astronomical importance of her undertaking, Darling’s Appendix A offers three illustrations of two famous astronomical clocks. These clocks “show the relative location of the sun and the moon,” as well as planets and... more
Reviewed by:
Nick Ripatrazone
“Listen, then.” Our House Was on Fire, the second collection of poems by Laura Van Prooyen, begins with a calm but firm declaration. I can appreciate the sentiment. Our days are outlined in prose, so the experience of poetry requires a revision of pacing and an increase in patience. Van Prooyen is able to maintain this duality of softness and confidence in an impressive manner. Her poems occupy sharp, absolute moments.Our House Was... more
Reviewed by:
Mary Buchinger
How does one begin to review an anthology of a century of poetry by over a hundred Armenian poets? Perhaps first by considering the translator—the one who selects the particular poems for translation from the pool of possibilities—which, in this case, is especially vast and deep given the richness of the Armenian poetry tradition. In a recent interview with Artsvi Bakhchinyan of the Armenian Weekly, Diana Der-Hovanessian, author of... more
Reviewed by:
Kristina Marie Darling
Helene Cardona's beautifully crafted collection, Dreaming My Animal Selves, drifts in and out of languages, presenting poems in both English and French translations. By doing so, the book raises several compelling questions about the relationship between language and human consciousness: Does language, with its complex grammatical rules, limit what is possible within conscious experience? When one inhabits more than one language, what... more
Reviewed by:
Karen An-hwei Lee
The latest collection by Brenda Hillman, an exploration of living phenomena and their mysteries, ignites a fiery post-lyric grammar of existence. Hillman’s devotion to social justice—her unwavering belief in poetry’s capacity to address root causes of our political strife—ultimately purifies our fallen world in the languages of elemental fire.Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire is organized in two parts, “I. On the Miracle of Nameless... more
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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
Reviewed by:
Lori A. May
Danielle Cadena Deulen has hit her stride and shows no signs of slowing. In a one-two punch, she has demonstrated her strength in prose and verse with recent successes in the awards circle. Her debut poetry collection, Lovely Asunder, was named The University of Arkansas Press 2011 Miller Williams Poetry Prize winner. This is on the heels of her 2010 AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction win... more
Reviewed by:
Ross Barkan
When Paul McCartney sang “Hey Jude” at the opening of the 2012 summer Olympics, he unintentionally displayed the profound and humbling power of the human voice. As McCartney and his backing band fought their way through an admirable performance of a song that once set international airwaves on fire, true music aficionados, not blinded by McCartney’s legend, could not help but shake their heads... more
Reviewed by:
Brian Libgober
Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic is a collection of literary essays by New York-based writer Arthur Krystal, a well-regarded book reviewer, who, over the course of his long freelance career, placed reviews with Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. However, fifteen years ago, while still at the height of his powers,... more
