Book Reviews
The Farther Shore
Book Reviews
Matthew Eck’s first novel, The Farther Shore, succeeds as a “true” war story. Josh Stantz, the novel’s narrator, despite being told by his lieutenant to “stop thinking so much, ”does not try to find meaning in the shadowy, haunted city, presumably somewhere in Africa, that he patrols. Eck, a former solider in Somalia and Haiti, resists the urge to become didactic and instead focuses on creating a world where the dead must be forgotten so that the living may be preserved.
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Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Book Reviews
While superstition, belief in evil spirits, or fear of bad karma is certainly not culture-specific (my Irish grandmother kept banshees away by rubbing her fingers raw on Rosary Beads), Díaz uses it as a foundation to explain the remarkably tough tidings that befall the good people of the Dominican Republic and one of its misplaced sons, Oscar Wao.
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Mykel Board’s EVEN A DAUGHTER IS BETTER THAN NOTHING
Book Reviews
Mykel Board's Even A Daughter Is Better Than Nothing lacks the type of overt soul-searching and self-discovery that one might expect from a travel book, much less one in which the author travels to Outer Mongolia, "a place as distant and foreboding as the moon."…
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Lara Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse
Book Reviews
Lara Vapnyar's first novel, Memoirs of a Muse, tells the story of Tanya, a young woman who moves from Moscow to live with her struggling immigrant relatives in 1980's Brighton Beach. Tanya's romantic experience at her Soviet university has been limited and disappointing, and her…
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Michelle Wildgen’s YOU’RE NOT YOU
Book Reviews
One of the great challenges in writing fiction about illness is keeping the story about people when the reality of medical constraints threatens to dominate. While readers want their authors to get the details of a disease right, the works that resonate are the ones…
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Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place
Book Reviews
In The Thin Place, Kathryn Davis creates another world, a semblance similar to the one we inhabit, yet composed of different primordial ether. Davis details the events of one season in a conjured New England town. And conjured it is, for seemingly ordinary Varennes is…
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Scott Snyder’s VOODOO HEART
Book Reviews
Scott Snyder's new story collection, Voodoo Heart, is an ensemble that trumpets the arrival of an inspired and imaginative young American writer. The book, Snyder's first, is comprised of seven independent pieces-the majority of which have enjoyed previous literary life in prestigious journals such as…
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Thaddeus Rutkowski’s TETCHED
Book Reviews
Thaddeus Rutkowski's novel Tetched is described by the author as "a novel in fractals." And indeed, it is in the structure where much of its allure lies. Rutkowski has created a work both suitable for short attention spans and reminiscent of performance poetry in its…
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Bill Buford’s HEAT
Book Reviews
Bill Buford is not afraid to get his feet wet. For his first book, Among the Thugs, the Granta founder and former New Yorker fiction editor immersed himself in the world of British soccer hooligans. Heat chronicles the 15 months Buford spent intermittently laboring in…
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Sara Gruen’s WATER FOR ELEPHANTS
Book Reviews
In a pulp exposé occupying a realm somewhere between soap opera and History Channel mini-series, Sara Gruen neatly packages a cavalcade of spectacle-Americana into a commercially viable romance. Water for Elephants is a portrait of "The Benzini Brothers' Most Spectacular Show on Earth" - a…
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Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s REMEMBER ME
Book Reviews
Every few years, death makes a comeback. Since the late 1970s, when Siouxsie Sioux declared herself a "gothic pixie," a death-obsessed aesthetic has cycled in and out of popular culture (and that's to say nothing of its predecessors, the madwomen-on-the-moors literary genre or the Victorian…
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Robert Westfield’s SUSPENSION
Book Reviews
Robert Westfield's debut, Suspension, has a plot, but you don't need to pay attention to it to enjoy the novel; the bulk of its pages pay loving homage to New York City. Westfield builds the framework of protagonist Andy Green's life atop a foundation of…
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Shari Goldhagen’s FAMILY AND OTHER ACCIDENTS
Book Reviews
At times brilliant, at times tactical and plain, Shari Goldhagen's Family and Other Accidents has moments of wisdom, wistfulness and elegiac beauty as it describes relationships atrophied by miscommunication and elapsed time. The novel recounts the accidental lives of the orphaned Reed brothers over two…
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Terese Svoboda’s TIN GOD
Book Reviews
Imagine wading through a field of wild grass that extends over your head. Your ruined shoes squish through mud; vines grasp your ankles. Wind whispers voices you cannot understand. You came looking for something you deeply desired, but the farther you push into the tangle,…
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Shelley Jackson’s HALF LIFE
Book Reviews
Mother and father get together: from two, one. This original coupling spawns life, the birth of I, and the journey of the self. Well, sometimes. Not quite so for Nora and Blanche, the twofer, or conjoined twins, at the center of Shelley Jackson's novel, Half…
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Douglas Light’s EAST FIFTH BLISS
Book Reviews
In a city where housing projects and luxury day spas coexist, and young hipsters awash in bling rub elbows with old immigrants held together by support hose, Douglas Light conjures up a mixed-bag of characters - sex-addled teens, love-starved focus group leaders, borderline bounty hunters,…
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Karen Russell’s ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES
Book Reviews
The precocious child narrators of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen Russell's daring debut, face hurdles far greater than puberty. The children have fathers with horns, voices that cause avalanches, and vocabularies most adults would envy. In one story, "Children's Reminiscences of…
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Satish Kumar’s THE BUDDHA AND THE TERRORIST
Book Reviews
Algonquin Books, September 2006 144 pages, $14.95 I suggest meditating before reading Satish Kumar's The Buddha and the Terrorist. Take time before opening this diminutive 121-pager to focus on the cover art: the faded azure sky, the lush fruit tree mirrored and introverted by a…
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Sid Jacobson’s and Ernie Colón’s THE 9/11 REPORT: A GRAPHIC ADAPTATION
Book Reviews
Hill and Wang, September 2006 128 pages, $30.00 This graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report brings a new immediacy to the original assessment of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In this illustrated edition, stark imagery, pared-down exposition, and neon-colored interjections ("Whoom!" "Shoom!") tell…
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Laird Hunt’s THE EXQUISITE
Book Reviews
Coffee House Press, September 2006256 pages, $14.95 Henry: thief, loser, and the main character in Laird Hunt's creepy novel The Exquisite, relates his story like a shell-shocked vet, weaving mundane detail and adventure in two narratives with spooky detachment. Henry's story is a bizarre one,…
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Jonathan Franzen’s THE DISCOMFORT ZONE
Book Reviews
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2006 185 pages, $22.00 Jonathan Franzen is normal. He may write more bestselling novels than you, or even make more public affronts to Oprah's integrity than you, but his new memoir, The Discomfort Zone, sinks its teeth in deep with…
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Rajiv Chandrasakaran’s IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: INSIDE IRAQ’S GREEN ZONE
Book Reviews
Knopf, September 2006 336 pages, $25.95 As we stare into gaping holes left in New York and New Orleans, it's hard not to draw comparisons to the hole we've burned, by our own devices, into arguably the greatest city of all time. That city is…
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Mark Z. Danielewski’s ONLY REVOLUTIONS
Book Reviews
Pantheon Press, September 2006, 384 pages, $26.00 Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions is two books in one, or two books that make a third: a road novel to be read left to right in the voice of Sam, and, once upside-downed, right to left in…
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Ian Frazier’s GONE TO NEW YORK: ADVENTURES IN THE CITY
Book Reviews
Picador, August 2006 224 pages, $14.00 In the essay collection Gone to New York, Ian Frazier delves into New York City just as an explorer from a far-off land would study an exotic locale. Having hitchhiked there in the early 1970s from his native Hudson,…
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Lynne Tillman’s AMERICAN GENIUS: A COMEDY
Book Reviews
Soft Skull Press, October 2006, 320 pages, $15.00I won't reveal the name of the narrator-protagonist of Lynne Tillman's American Genius, since it pops up suddenly, almost arbitrarily, in the last third of the book. But its placement is a perfect act of characterization: the narrator…
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Nina Vida’s THE TEXICANS
Book Reviews
Soho Press, October 1, 2006, 304 pages, $23.00In The Texicans, Nina Vida combines reverent tones of magical realism with the brutality of a Cormac McCarthy novel to create a captivating and original vision of the Texas frontier circa 1845. John Wayne might have had a…
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Stephen Elliott’s MY GIRLFRIEND COMES TO THE CITY AND BEATS ME UP
Book Reviews
Cleis Press, October 2006, 144 pages, $13.95The real question in Stephen Elliott's short story collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up is not whether these tales are autobiographical or not (though Elliott admits that many are true, or mostly true, in…
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Janet Fitch’s PAINT IT BLACK
Book Reviews
Little, Brown, September 2006, 352 pages, $24.99Janet Fitch's novels make fine companions for the beach, the subway, the doctor's office waiting room. Page-turners, they flow with a fairly straightforward progression of minor conflicts and resolutions that can be interrupted and restarted with ease. Vivid depictions…
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Sarah Hall’s HAWESWATER
Book Reviews
Harper Perennial, October 2006, 304 pages, $13.95They say that Eskimos have 1000 words for snow yet the English language only has a handful of words to describe rain. The enormously talented Sarah Hall, in her moving and slightly subversive novel, Haweswater, seems to have single-handedly…
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Emily Maguire’s TAMING THE BEAST
Book Reviews
Harper Perennial, September 2006336 pages, $13.99A fierce student-teacher affair forms the core of first-time novelist Emily Maguire's Taming the Beast. Encasing this passionate narrative is a bold statement in modern gothic fiction: modern love is sadistic and satisfying, whilst true love as the wholesome ideal,…
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Heidi Julavits’ THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT
Book Reviews
Doubleday, October 2006, 368 pages, $24.95Hello Scheherazade… Few works of modern literary fiction cause much surprise, but The Uses of Enchantment is an exception. Heidi Julavits' third solo novel is a thrilling read that leaves the reader guessing, as Julavits details the superlative yet ordinary…
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Stefan Kanfer’s STARDUST LOST
Book Reviews
Knopf, October 2006 352 pages, $26.95 Stefan Kanfer just might know every detail of the last 150 years of Eastern European and American Jewish history. In Stardust Lost, he manages to fit most of that history into less than 300 pages, and to connect all…
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Brian Wood’s and Riccardo Burchielli’s DMZ: ON THE GROUND
Book Reviews
In the first few panels of DMZ: On the Ground, the first collection of Vertigo's ongoing comic book, graffiti states that "Every day is 9/11." However, even if 9/11 has a symbolic significance for DMZ and the world Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli have created,…
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James Chapman’s STET
Book Reviews
Fugue State Press, January 2006, 336 pages, $16Stet is the story of a Soviet filmmaker who might really be-at least to Authority, and to the imposed and imposing tastes of the lumpenproles-no filmmaker at all. For reasons perhaps only slightly more official than personal, this…
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Kelly Braffet’s LAST SEEN LEAVING
Book Reviews
Five dead girls, a missing pilot, CIA cover-ups, a runaway, and a mysterious unidentified serial killer. In Kelly Braffet's new novel, Last Seen Leaving, these typical thriller scenarios are written in a graceful prose that creates what could only be called literary fiction. Braffet's gothic…
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Lynda Hull’s COLLECTED POEMS
Book Reviews
AR Ammons once said: "I have 4/interests--money, poetry, sex, death." In Lynda Hull's three poetry collections, Ghost Money, Star Ledger, and The Only World, compiled here in a single volume as part of the Graywolf Re/View Poetry series, Ammons' 4 interests are sutured by jazz…
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Brian Evenson’s THE OPEN CURTAIN
Book Reviews
Coffee House Press, October 2006 218 pages, $14.95 Identity is fluid in Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain, a novel that probes into the secrets of Mormonism. Rudd, a Utah teenager, finds an article in a 1902 New York Times that recounts the murder of a…
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Gabrielle Bell’s LUCKY
Book Reviews
Drawn & Quarterly, November 2006 112 pages, $15.96 Gabrielle Bell's autobiographical, award-winning minicomic, Lucky, is now an elegant hardback thanks to Drawn & Quarterly. In Lucky, Bell shapes her everyday experiences into short stories about apartment woes, crappy jobs, and picnics in the park. Included…
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FLASH FICTION FORWARD: 80 VERY SHORT STORIES, Edited by James Thomas & Robert Shapard
Book Reviews
W. W. Norton, August 2006 320 pages, $15.95 Flash Fiction Forward, edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard, is the newest compilation of flash fiction in an already well-populated category of anthologies. Almost twenty-three years after the release of their first collaboration, Sudden Fiction, the…
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William Gay’s TWILIGHT
Book Reviews
MacAdam Cage, October 2006 300 pages, $16.50 William Gay's Twilight borrows heavily from Cormac McCarthy's semi-autobiographical Suttree; it is somewhere between a homage and an imitation. Both take place in mid-century Tennessee, and both are about young men who flee into the wilderness. Cornelius Suttree's…
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Chris Adrian’s THE CHILDREN HOSPITAL
Book Reviews
McSweeney's, August 2006 $24.00, 480 pages If the physical maladies afflicting the patients in Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital are rare and complex, the spiritual sickness plaguing the hospital's adult population is by comparison commonplace. From Pickie Beecher and his blood-thirsty pica to Ella Thim,…
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Paulo Lins’ CITY OF GOD: A NOVEL
Book Reviews
Grove Press, September 2006 448 pages, $15.00 The characters in Paulo Lins' City of God have developed immunity to the world. They are capable of killing without batting an eye. This absence of love creates a desire so horrific it sometimes leads to an intolerable…
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Daniel Kehlmann’s MEASURING THE WORLD
Book Reviews
Pantheon, November 2006 272 pages, $23.00 Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World, which was on the German bestseller list for over a year, is a rich and comic novel that will reward the readers who keep with it. The book feels much more dense than its…
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Heather Chaplin’s and Aaron Ruby’s SMARTBOMB: THE QUEST FOR ART, ENTERTAINMENT AND BIG BUCKS IN THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION
Book Reviews
Algonquin Books, October 2006 304 pages, $13.95 It's appropriate that Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution chooses not to be a straight history of the videogame but a collection of profiles focusing on the people who defined what…
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Paul Barrett’s AMERICAN ISLAM: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF A RELIGION
Book Reviews
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, December 2006 320 pages, $25.00 If the soul of religion, any religion, can be imposed from the top down, more than Islam is in trouble. A seasoned reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Paul M. Barrett has written a book following…
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Daniel Alarcon’s LOST CITY RADIO
Book Reviews
Harper Collins, January 2007 272 pages, $24.95 Place was paramount in Daniel Alarcon's 2005 short story collection, War by Candlelight. Whether imprisoned in a Peruvian jail or window shopping on 125th Street in East Harlem, a character's orientation in place and time was central to…
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Andrew Helfer and Randy DuBurke’s MALCOM X: A GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY
Book Reviews
Hill & Wang, November 2006 112 pages, $15.95 The road to respectability for the literary graphic novel was more or less paved in 1992 by Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning Maus. Mr. Spiegelman employed his artistic style to great effect, dramatizing his father's memories of Nazi Germany…
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Banana Yoshimoto’s HARDBOILED AND HARDLUCK
Book Reviews
New Directions, November 2006, 288 pages, $45.00 As one of the most charming, itinerant and unorthodox publishers America has known, what better form could the autobiography of James Laughlin take than that of a random sampling from his notebooks? The Way It Wasn't is Laughlin's…
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Michele Morano’s GRAMMAR LESSONS
Book Reviews
University of Iowa Press, March 2007 184 pages, $22.50 Grammar Lessons, by Michele Morano, is a thought-provoking collection of thirteen personal essays grouped by her three stages of experiences with Spanish language and culture. Oviedo, the first stage, details Morano's stay in Spain as a…
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Colm Tóibín’s MOTHERS AND SONS
Book Reviews
Scribner, January 2007, 288 pages, $24.00Colm Tóibín's dazzling new collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, contains-as one would expect from the title-multiple mother-son relationships, all harboring different twists of heartbreak. Mothers and Sons is the follow-up to Tóibín's 2004 novel, The Master, a historical…
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