Reviews
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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…
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Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson
The cover of Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts, in print and as eBook, is as visually compelling as the cover of Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, An Index, the first poetry selection in McSweeney’s new series. The cloth binding of Fragile Acts is…
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Four New Messages, by Joshua Cohen
It’s hard to write well about the Internet. This is partly, as many have noted, because life on a screen is already mediated, so to write about these corners of twenty-first-century existence is to attempt, in some ways, a representation…
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David S. Atkinson: A Rumpus Book Club Member Reviews We Only Know So Much
Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much focuses on the lives of a bunch of messed up people. Really messed up people, in fact. Okay, there’s a great deal more than that…but it’s a good spot to begin.
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Dispatch From the Future by Leigh Stein
I don’t think I ever laughed with a poem. Sometimes I chuckle at a clever turn of phrase, or at a shared sentiment, or a little idiosyncrasy that I thought all my own, and though I laughed at that dirty…