Reviews
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“In Time’s Rift” by Ernst Meister
In Heidegger’s essay ‘The Nature of Language’ he poses the question “When does language speak itself as language?” He answers: “Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages…
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My Heart Is an Idiot, by Davy Rothbart
Modern literary fiction is so often told from an immersive first person perspective that sometimes the line between the classic essayist and the contemporary novelist disappears. Found Magazine originator and frequent “This American Life” contributor Davy Rothbart’s new book, the brilliantly…
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Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky
Thunderbird is one of the more traditional collections I’ve come across recently, both in tone and in form. Lasky doesn’t experiment heavily with form, preferring to stick to free verse occasionally broken into stanzas. Lasky lets her words do the…
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Yok, by Tim Davys
Life on streets of Tim Davys’ novel, Yok, is tough. Choices are hard, and knocks are harder. But the characters are soft. Squeezably soft. Stuffed with little more than fluff, the foxes, monkeys, goats, rabbits, and geckos in Tim Davys’ Aesop-esque…
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Having Been an Accomplice by Laura Cronk
Cronk’s Having Been an Accomplice is layered in the “imagined” of the real world, no matter the continent.
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This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz
To read Junot Díaz can be to learn about yourself and your views of his characters as much as you do about the stories themselves.
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The Branches, The Axe, The Missing by Charlotte Pence
Charlotte Pence, author of Weaves a Clear Night has created in The Branches, the Axe, the Missing a work of significant mythic force that explores intimate circumstances of a woman fraught with sorrow borne out of problematic relationships with an…
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Sportista, by Andrei S. Markovits and Emily K. Albertson
This summer my husband and I had Olympics fever. We watched NBC’s tape-delayed broadcast every night and live online coverage of our favorite sports (gymnastics for me, track and field for him) during the day. But our viewing habits diverged…
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I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield famously said that the mark of a great author is whether, after reading their work, you want to call them up to talk, want to gab with them about nothing much and everything in between. You…
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Between Heaven and Here, by Susan Straight
Susan Straight has remarkable range as a writer. Her voice can be elegant in the rhythms and vocabulary of her narrative, yet also blunt and raw in dialogue. In her latest novel, Between Heaven and Here, the third of a…
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Letters From Robots by Diana Salier
I am not impressed with writers who refuse to use punctuation or capitalization; that gimmick has been famously used already, so now it comes across as lazy and unoriginal. Also, I have no patience for unspecific second person singular or…
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Tall, Slim & Erect, by Alex Forman
Three quarters of the way through Alex Forman’s multimedia paean to presidential minutiae, Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents, you hit this candid entry from Harry Truman’s 1947 diary: This great white jail is a hell of a…