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From Stephen Elliott
Some novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel.
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On the year anniversary of its publication, Anna March contemplates the impact Jürgen Fauth’s Kino made on her.
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Joe Winkler reviews the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Autumn Elizabeth reviews Henry Williams’s seasons smooth and unperplext today in Rumpus Poetry.
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A multi-generation novel is a risky thing. What gives it that unity that distinguishes a novel from a book of linked short stories? How does an author handle the passage of time or the death of her protagonist as one generation cedes to the next and the next?
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Julie Marie Wade reviews Jan Beatty’s The Switching Yard today in Rumpus Poetry.
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If the theories in Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now are true, you may have a hard time finishing this review. In the interest of the perpetual now, I’ll cut to the chase: you should read this book.
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While a short story collection can be knitted together in a lot of different ways—character, theme, setting, subject matter or tone—how tightly it should be woven is less defined. Some collections are so knotted that all the life is wrung out of them.
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Michelle Salcido reviews Kelly Davio’s Burn This House today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Brynn Downing reviews Nick Courtright’s Punchline today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Richard Hell – underground poet, critic, and one of the chief architects of New York’s punk scene in the 1970s – begins his long-awaited autobiography with a snapshot of childhood in 1950s middle America: “Like many in my time, when I was little I was a cowboy,” he writes.
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Josh Cook reviews Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black today in Rumpus Poetry.
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“It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us,” novelist Colum McCann writes in the foreword for Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton’s new collection of wartime short stories, Fire and Forget. “It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom,” he continues.
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Tova Gardner reviews Hadara Bar-Nadav’s Lullaby (with Exit Sign) today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Released from Coffee House Press in September 2012 and recently honored as one of four PEN/Faulkner Award finalists, Laird Hunt’s Kind One is a crushing and beautiful book. Taking place over the span of a century, 1830-1930, Kind One weaves together the lives of Linus Lancaster, his second wife Ginny, and his five farm and house hands, following how they brawl and bend from Indiana to Kentucky, through death and abuse, and into a future loaded with loss, defiance, and perseverance.
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Kent Shaw reviews Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine today in Rumpus Poetry.
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When we are young every decision seems weighted with extra meaning. A teenager can trace the exact steps that lead from the missing of a ski trip to the life of an outcast. Not being allowed to date a certain boy means remaining single forever.
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On August 3, 1846, the day Abraham Lincoln won election to his only term in Congress, the gangly, 37-year-old country lawyer was unknown outside his Illinois district. America was a country of 28 states, largely unsettled west of the Mississippi. Political divisions were framed by non-regional differences on economic issues—tariffs, the national bank, the federal government’s role in infrastructure—much as it had been since the party system first developed 50 years before.
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David Peak reviews Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Andrew Field reviews Jon Woodward’s Uncanny Valley today in Rumpus Poetry.
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The prolific Percival Everett tackles the timeless psychic tug-of-war between fathers and sons with zigzagging, psychedelic verve in his twentieth novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Everett has mastered his playful, self-referential style, and seems more intent than ever to alternately puzzle and move the reader, often in the span of a single sentence.
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Maya Popa reviews Averill Curdy’s Song and Error today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Loneliness seems to be having a moment. Of course, the subject isn’t entirely new. Alexis de Tocqueville identified a brand of loneliness seemingly specific to America back in the mid-nineteenth century; we also have 1950’s The Lonely Crowd and 2000’s Bowling Alone.
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“It was 1994, the year of bad, low-blood-sugar decisions,” begins Ali Liebegott in her frank, funny and painfully realistic new novel Cha-Ching!
I remember making a lot of bad decisions during my own version of 1994 – and Liebegott’s heroine, Theo, certainly makes her share in this novel – but the author smartly resists the urge to pigeonhole her narrative into a time capsule, aside from the brief date-drop and the fact that we are introduced to the protagonist while she is watching a show that evokes the Fox Network’s decade-long devotion to police chases.
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Virginia Konchan reviews Phil Metres’ abu ghraib arias today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Barbara Berman reviews Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins today in Rumpus Poetry.
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In one of the more memorable passages of Ali Smith’s Artful, the narrator notes how “surprisingly lightly” we treat books “in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.” As I wound my way for the first time through Smith’s latest book, I kept returning to that remark.
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Julie Marie Wade reviews Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia today in Rumpus Poetry.
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