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. In heightened moments Kennedy uses language to bind thought to physical sensation, which in turn stimulates a replicated response in the brain of the reader. This simulated experience is what makes her stories so striking and also intense.
In an occasionally polemical and highly impassioned voice, Edith Grossman advances the most brilliant and persuasive arguments for the absolute importance of literary translation I have ever encountered.
Zadie Smith, the prodigiously gifted English novelist, seems to have been caught in the tangle of literary debate from the beginning. White Teeth, her first novel, became doubly famous for being the subject of James Wood’s essay “Hysterical Realism” (first published in The New Republic, and later collected in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and [...]
Declan Kiberd, a professor of Irish literature, has set out to rescue Ulysses from its reputation.
Scialabba writes as if he’s trying by sheer example value to will a smarter, more honest, more aesthetically and morally sensitive Left into being.
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, poems that–while never descending to the aw-shucks folksiness of a Billy Collins–treat their recurrent themes in lyrical, [...]
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. Trot it out to the right café or park bench, and people will crane to try to discern what you’re reading. Visually, its obvious allusion (though a Google [...]
It would be an understatement to say that Roth has never excelled at writing women characters.
First, I am not the strong reader I might like to be. Second, I found Chronic City tedious, boring, and uninspiring. Third, the second might find cause in the first.
Glittery and disco-flashy, but never indulgent, Greenman’s novel is so fluid that one probably won’t pick up on the key changes…
The Forgiveness of Funny 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 [...]
Pain is one of the particles forming the novel’s packed core. The story focuses (largely) on graying-haired Harry, a man who once suffered a loss that left his life in shambles.
The characters in these stories are all recovering from the demise of a major relationship: a broken marriage, neglectful parents, ungrateful children, lack of sex, sexual abuse, and overall disillusionment with the people closest to them.
Throughout the novel, Coulson’s narration slips fluidly between the perspectives of the three generations of Moore men, jumbling timelines and storylines without much fuss over which parts belong to the present and which to the past.
The unspoken message seems to be: Reader, be not smug! If it can happen to me, it can, and might, happen to you.
[1] Mary Robison is really fucking good. Still, I approached this new book with skepticism. Trepidation, even. How can a person, I asked myself, Mary Robison or not, 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? The [...]
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.
Moments of keen insight are buried beneath the misguided colloquial monologue that occupies the bulk of Free Burning.
Martian Dawn: A Novelby Michael FriedmanThe plot of poet Michael Friedman’s new novel, Martian Dawn, 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. [...]
As the sole woman to occupy a throne at the meeting point of heaven and earth, this extraordinary personage is perhaps a perfect fit for Shan’s grandiose writing style.
I read The Week You Weren’t Here while getting my nails done. I read it on the taxi ride home, glancing down at the page through patches of streetlight. I read it over dinner until my boyfriend asked me whether the book was good and I had no idea what to say.
Throughout the book’s 25 essays, Gass is the champion—sometimes joyful, sometimes harsh—of intellectual fitness. For him, reading is a form of aerobics.
Nothing But an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, The Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited A Generation By Denis O’Hearn. Published by Nation Books, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group. 2006. 385 pages. $28.00. “If you remember nothing else, remember this. No crime a man commits on his behalf of his freedom can be as great as [...]
Novelist Christian Bauman ponders the triumphs and tribulations of memoirists James Frey and Anthony Swofford and the lure of the publishing industry’s nonfiction fix
O’Shay wants to retire from his job. He wants to walk away from what has become too easy for him—getting close to his enemies and then destroying them.
Anyone with an email account or a television is aware that the popularity of the game of poker is at an all-time high.
The primary question on Katie’s mind is, how did she lose control of her life?
Angie Kritenbrink reviews prominent Omaha poet’s latest chapbook
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