Marisa Silver in her new novel, Mary Coin, takes all this on and the result is a compelling, hard-to-put down story. As the cover of the novel suggests, the story emanates from the photograph, “Migrant Mother,” taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936 at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California.
Fight Song, Joshua Mohr’s fourth novel, is a suburban picaresque about a character cursed with a name that highlights his own mediocrity and the futility of his efforts: Bob Coffen.…
At their best, love and translation share some contradictions, including selfishness and generosity. Translation is impossible, or at least not very good, without a passionate desire to own the material…
To get to Cannonia, the setting for Charles Newman’s long-awaited and posthumously published novel, In Partial Disgrace, you’ll have a choice of gigs: “fantailed or tub-bodied; a chariotee, rockaway, or…
Something similar about desire and resistance to desire is going on with David Shields, a core theme begun in Reality Hunger and now extended with How Literature Saved My Life. Dramatizing uncertainty, in authors Shields devours and lauds (think Geoff Dyer on D. H. Lawrence), is a new, largely nonfictional form, doggedly essayistic, bleedingly memoiristic. This genre amalgam is displacing traditional literary categories, especially the novel, “an artifact,” Shields writes, “which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.”
Lidia Yuknavitch's Dora: A Headcase is an uncomfortable, edgy, affecting novel. The Chronology of Water had the same charge: take challenging subject matter and build a narrative akin to unpacking tension-wracked nesting dolls, cumulative sadness and worry with each new section.
Winning just about every national poetry slam competition there is, Sierra DeMulder’s words and poetic swagger have won untouchable real estate in my bookshelf. DeMulder’s newest book, New Shoes on…