Reviews
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An Individual History by Michael Collier
Collier’s poems refuse to submit to a culture that has come to hold the individual suspect or in contempt. Many offer poignant but unsentimental family portraits made with vivid detail, with images that are remembered, hence recovered and immortalized.
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Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s novel, Children in Reindeer Woods, opens on a summer day during wartime in an unnamed country: the sun is high in the sky. Three soldiers cross a green meadow toward a two-story farmhouse. A small group of adults…
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A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
For those of you with literary ambitions, be warned: this book might be painful. You will read A Sense of Direction and recall your confused chasing of said ambition, all that procrastination and thrown time, the (essential but still stinging)…
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Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney
McSweeney asks us to inhabit the conflicting edges of that reality, mouthing the power and joy that come with degeneracy.
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The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories, by Ivan Vladislavic
In his recent blend of fiction, essays, and literary genealogy, The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories, South African writer Ivan Vladislavic delves into the dazzling enigmas of unwritten work. He draws from his personal notebooks over the past two…
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Double Shadow by Carl Phillips
Double Shadow seems to find the poet at mid-breath, or in a time of transition where the voice may be in flux from previous work; but the watchful eye, and the careful hand that crafts these verses, is still ever-present.
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Occupy Nation by Todd Gitlin
What hath the OWS movement wrought? Depends on who you ask. Naysayers, including most Republicans and Rupert Murdoch’s various media organs, will tell you that OWS created nothing but trouble, violence, a disruption of the peace, and distraction from key issues. The…
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The Truth about Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
The title of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s most recent novel, The Truth About Marie, is an impish wink and a nudge to the reader. The plot, such as it is, involves a man describing his ex-girlfriend Marie’s relationship with another man after…
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Madame X by Darcie Dennigan
Madame X pilots the idea that the line between reality and dream is not so much collapsible as it is meant to be collapsed.
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Soul of a Whore and Purvis by Denis Johnson
As a writer, Denis Johnson has demonstrated a remarkable ability to polarize. On the one hand he has impressed some of the most prestigious awards committees in the United States. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, won the National Book…
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Watchword by Pura López Colomé
There is spiritual alchemy at work here, making one wish this piece, and many others, could be chanted by choruses taking turns, in both languages, with an audience not responding audibly between poems.
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Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Anyone who aspires to write will find the story of Ben Fountain—and the story of how his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, came to be —both inspiring and heart-rending. Fountain began writing fiction at the age of thirty. He did not begin by dabbling, dangling pretty sentences…