Book Reviews
The Farther Shore
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.read »
Fiction
The Scraping Sound of Auto Parts
Fiction
Your little sister is late. Outside the terminal, a slight drizzle slants in the orange streetlights. Everyone else on your flight has long since been picked up or connected to another destination. You hear her car before you see it, a scraping sound of auto parts traveling across potholes. As soon as she pulls up, your nephew climbs through the…
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Whaling Song
Fiction
“Are you Middle-Eastern?” She leaned forward with her knees pressed together. “I’m Italian and Polish.” It was a common misconception. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and over the tanned skin of his face a five o’clock shadow which, left to its own devices, transformed itself into a dark and exceptionally full beard. His name was equally deceiving. “Is it…
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Beat: A Morality Tale
Fiction
The ritual is the best part, the pouring of white powder from the brightly colored construction paper envelope onto the glass table, the chopping of it with an American Express card, the rolling of everyone’s twenty dollar bills, the rush of fragmentary joy at the bachelor party after the stuff’s been inhaled. But around ten in the evening, they run…
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The Tragedy of Gary Moretti
Fiction
Ed. Note: This time three years ago, it was impossible to escape the ghost of Gary Moretti. The nation was entranced by the ubiquitous Tozzi photograph, the hour-long specials on NBC and CBS, and the running debates on newspaper op-ed pages and cable news programs. This 23-year-old kid momentarily seized the popular discourse in America and abroad, not so much…
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A B Plan
Fiction
Samantha Hunt Sometimes I give speeches at elementary schools. I wait backstage in the wings where they hang the discarded costumes of the four food groups, costumes that are now unused, in light of the Surgeon General’s newly revised food pyramid. From here I overhear the students asking questions like, “Who is this guy?” or “What were they doing on…
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Columns
[CRIME CORNER] Lawrence Block: Romance of the Ordinary Life
Columns
Lawrence Block, Hit and Run 304 pages, $24.95 Published by William Morrow Keller is back. This spring, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block rolled out the latest exploits of Keller, full-time assassin and amateur philatelist. Block’s newest novel in 3 years, Hit and…
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[CRIME CORNER] Busted: Ken Bruen & Jason Starr Kill The Lone Wolf Enterprise
Columns
by Brendan McCall Essayist Edward Hoagland once told me that writing was a ‘real lone-wolf enterprise.’ Obviously, crime fiction authors Ken Bruen and Jason Starr missed that memo. In 2006, the duo wrote Bust (Barry Award nomination for “Best Paperback Novel of the Year"). This…
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[CRIME CORNER] The Secret Identities of Charles Ardai
Columns
by Brendan McCall Don’t let that charming grin fool you. Charles Ardai’s business is crime. By day, he puts in long hours as the co-founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, an exciting independent publishing house he founded with author Max Phillips. By night, he…
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[CRIME CORNER] Finishing The Job: Collins Completes Spillane Swan Song
Columns
by Brendan McCall Halloween is a time of tricks and mischief. This past Halloween marked the release date of a special treat for crime fiction fans: a new book by Mickey Spillane, the godfather of the pulps. Dead Street (Hard Case Crime) bears a number…
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Novel Appearances: French Book Art at the New York Public Library
Columns
by Anne K. Yoder A thin forest green box lies adrift in a sea of papers: meticulous diagrams of conical and cylindrical machine parts, a small sliver with a few words, a vortex of ninety-three sheets sprawling outward from the center. Large letters composed of…
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Interviews
Blue-Eyed Devil: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
Interviews
by David Hunter On the surface, Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America seems like it will be a "let's get to know the neighbors" punk-rock companion piece to Paul Barrett's American Islam. If that doesn't quite describe it, it's because author Michael Muhammad…
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Ken Foster: From Literary Impressario to Pit Bull Advocate
Interviews
Not a Sunday night goes by when I don't think of Ken Foster. As I stand behind the duct-taped podium wedged in the corner of the KGB Bar, just as I am about to introduce the authors, I think: Would he approve of my selection?…
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Jhumpa Lahiri on PEN’s World Voices
Interviews
Interview by Suzanne Dottino I met Jhumpa Lahiri when she read from her novel, The Namesake , at KGB Bar as part of the Sunday Night Fiction Series along with Susan Choi (author of American Woman). Jhumpa arrived carrying her firstborn wrapped in a blanket…
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On a Clear Night You Can Read Forever: Scribblers on the Roof
Interviews
by Mary Phillips-Sandy For more than fifty years a synagogue has stood at the northeast corner of West End Avenue and West 100th Street in Manhattan. The synagogue is called Congregation Ansche Chesed, and in the summer of 1999 its roof became home to an…
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Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi
Interviews
by John Haskell I recently went to the show at the Noguchi Museum called "Best of Friends," an exhibition chronicling the collaborations between Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, and what struck me wasn't the work itself, but the sense of idealism that their work was…
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Book Reviews
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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