book Reviews
What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy
The stories in A.L. Kennedy’s What Becomes seem driven by two entities: the author’s brain and her prose appendage. The latter is so alive it appears to possess a separate language pulse.
Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
As Edith Grossman, the distinguished translator of Marquez, Vargas Llosa and Cervantes, tells us in her brilliant new book, Why Translation Matters: “The sad statistics indicate that in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, only two to three percent of books published each year are literary translations.”
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith, the prodigiously gifted English novelist, seems to have been caught in the tangle of literary debate from the beginning.
What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba
“I find conscientious qualification much sexier than resonant exaggeration,” writes George Scialabba, and he’s not kidding. This book, culled from nearly thirty years’ worth of reviews for magazines like the Boston Review and Agni, is proof.
Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry by Donald Hall
For more than fifty years, Donald Hall has had a two-sided career, his fifteen books of poetry matched by fifteen books of nonfiction. More than any other poet of his generation, he is known for clear, accessible verse.
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece by Declan Kiberd
One of the inescapable features of American cultural life, ca. The Year We Make Contact, is a pervasive mixup of bully and underdog, a mass inability to tell Davids from Goliaths.
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Headstrong girls and women make the best narrators—they’re sassy, agitated, and predisposed toward action once their inner injustice detectors calculate the full measure of their circumstances.
Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler
Right off the bat, Scorch Atlas asserts itself as, if not the coolest-looking book you’ve ever fanned between your fingers, on the short-list, interior and exterior alike.
The Humbling by Philip Roth (1 of 2)
Reading Roth is like being instantly transferred into another mind, a mind in which all the boring crap has been burned away. It's mesmerizing and stimulating and exciting and soothing all at once.
The Humbling by Philip Roth (2 of 2)
It would be an understatement to say that Roth has never excelled at writing women characters. Aside from his vividly memorable depictions of his male protagonists’ mothers, Roth has rarely offered a convincing portrayal of a female character in a novel.
Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem
Chronic City can entertain readers and writers who are willing to patiently dissect its meaning and formulate its connections, who happily place ideas and themes on pedestals in whose shadows lurk plot and character.
Please Step Back by Ben Greenman
There's a thumping, pulsating bass line suffusing the language of Ben Greenman's newest novel, Please Step Back, a snaky rhythm that traces Rock Foxx's rise to stardom and a slow dirge following his inevitable fall from grace.
A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore
No one who is a fan of Lorrie Moore, or of coming-of-age novels rich in wit and specificity, should resist reading A Gate At The Stairs. It contains patented Moore delights: mordant humor in shades of gray to charcoal, a quirky, self-deprecating heroine who notices both too much and not enough about the people in her life, a bushel of laugh-out-loud depictions of contemporary American mores and fripperies, and finally, a double examination of the fragility of love’s intent.
Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt
Consider the f-bomb: you can trace the trajectory of the story’s heart by the elegant deployment of that dexterous cuss word across the pages of Ray of the Star, Laird Hunt’s latest (arguably best, unarguably most emotionally engaging) novel.
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
by Wells Tower
Familial love is a double-edged sword. Loved ones can act as the most essential structure for support, and they can also be the first to break down the very foundation they helped to build.
Of Song and Water by Joseph Coulson
In Of Song and Water (Archipelago Books, 2007 [Paperback 2009]), Joseph Coulson compresses the multigenerational sweep of a family epic into the humble confines of a small novel about middle-aged regret.
One Falling, One Diving: A Review of Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine
Recently I've read a number of memoirs about the terrible things that can happen to ordinary, well-meaning middle-class parents when their children approach adolescence: their offspring can develop eating disorders, run away, or turn into meth addicts, among countless other horrors.
Gary Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way
We have names for writers as forcefully original as Lutz, none of them flattering: at worst, he’s pretentious or inaccessible, while at best he’s experimental, a word that always makes the reader-in-waiting wonder if it’s her patience that’s to be experimented upon.
The Last Years of John Updike: Endpoint and Other Poems
Leave it to the late, great John Updike to offer what is one of the finest meditations on death in recent history.
Mary Robison's One D.O.A., One on the Way
How can a person, I asked myself, pull off a novel-in-fragments twice in one lifetime? Moreover: in one decade! Tiny oblique snippets plus knife-voiced narrator plus language electric equals rich and stunning narrative—twice?
Paul Pope's 100%
100% is a love story, after a fashion. Or, more accurately, three loosely connected love stories, all told without so much as a drop of sentimental syrup.
The Sound of Silence: Review of All the Living by C.E. Morgan
The good news about C.E. Morgan’s debut novel is that it is not a big, noisy novel where information and sub-plots sprout like weeds on every page. In fact, rather than suffer from an excess of vitality, it might be argued that All the Living suffers from a vitality deficiency.
Free Burning by Bayo Ojikutu
It's not uncommon for a short work of fiction to elicit a reaction that calls for more—that the richness of the story and the characters could very well expand into a novel. Not so often is the inverse true for novels winnowing down to a shorter work, novella or less.
Martian Dawn by Michael Friedman
The plot of poet Michael Friedman's new novel unfurls across Hollywood, a biosphere, a nameless space station, Mars, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, all places with an absurdity quotient significant enough to render serious, dramatic conflict difficult to sustain.
Empress by Shan Sa
Shan Sa, the author of the prizewinning The Girl Who Played Go, has reached much further back in time for her latest effort, a fictional biography of Empress Shengshen, China’s only female emperor and one of history’s most legendary wicked women.
The Week You Weren’t Here by Charles Blackstone
The Week You Weren’t Here is the rambling interior monologue of Hunter Flanagan, a young writer living in Chicago and applying to MFA programs. Most of his mental energy is spent obsessively analyzing a series of past romantic entanglements and agonizing over present and future ones.
A Temple of Texts: Essays by William H. Gass
For Gass, reading is a form of aerobics. It is a demanding, exertive, physical act, and as such it stretches, tones, and conditions those who are turning the pages.
Jumping for that Elusive Truth
A look at the triumphs and tribulations of memoirists James Frey and Anthony Swofford and the lure of the publishing industry’s nonfiction fix.
More reviews from the wayback and when:
The Dew Breaker, The Glory Cloak, Soul of Nowhere, When the Bough Breaks, Runaway, First There is a Mountain, Not the End of the World, The Literature of Poker, Stand Up, Ernie Baxter: You're Dead, Everyone's Burning, Denarration and the Persistence of Memory in the Work of Douglas Coupland, Trash and Serious Literature in America: Aristotle Blows the Whistle on Us, The Inner Life and the Social World in the Work of James Baldwin
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