Reviews
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Crossing State Lines: An American Renga edited by Bob Homan and Carol Muske-Dukes
I first discovered Renga: A Chain of Poems (Brazillier, 1972) in a used bookstore in New York during my first year of graduate school. I was transfixed.
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“The Festival of Earthly Delights,” by Matt Dojny
When asked by Necessary Fiction to describe the research for his debut novel, The Festival of Earthly Delights, Matt Dojny hand-wrote a scrawling response filled with oddities, doodles, and this moment of witty insight: “But, you’re asking, what kind of…
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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Kevin Nolan reviews Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan today in Rumpus Books.
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“The Girls of Peculiar” by Catherine Pierce
There is a canon of cinema that revolves around girls leaving girlhood, and finding themselves young and nubile, ready (so they think) to embrace their future as women. There’s the girl who seduces her teacher, only to realize she should…
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“Diving Belles,” by Lucy Wood
The very act of writing is a kind of magic. Small black etchings on paper conjure up worlds, people, events, transporting you, the reader, to a different place, a different time. Really, it’s one short leap from “spell” and “casting…
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“Robinson Alone” by Kathleen Rooney
First things first: you don’t have to be a fan of Weldon Kees to enjoy this book. Shameful confession: until I read the note that precedes the table of contents, I’d never even heard of Weldon Kees or his Robinson…
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“Hush Hush,” by Steven Barthelme
Steven Barthelme’s new collection of short stories Hush Hush plays like the best of saddest love songs. These are elegiac, yet hopeful stories about characters who bumble through existence, struggle to articulate their feelings, and careen towards moments that can’t…
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“Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” by D. T. Max
Like many latecomers to his work, my introduction to David Foster Wallace began with a reading of his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. I remember being struck initially, immediately, by its honesty, its rhetorical courage, its compassion.
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Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin
The translation of poetry requires justification. Not necessarily for conceptual reasons, but because the experience of reading translated poetry however transcendent and beautiful always feels lacking, incomplete, like living in a body missing some essential organ. Of course, this remains…
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“HHhH,” by Laurent Binet
Winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and translated from the French by Sam Taylor, Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH centers around the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, referenced in the title as “Himmlers Hirn heist Heydrich,” or “Himmler’s brain…
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“How to Survive a Hotel Fire” by Veronica Wong
The princess is not a poet, but we never forget that she is written by one, a very good one indeed.
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“Fobbit,” by David Abrams
“The real war is unlikely to be found in novels,” writes the late Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. He argues that novels are unlikely purveyors of wartime truth because on one…