Reviews
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My Fruit Bat, My Gewgaw
These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea.
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Adventures in the Narrative
Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, Uncanny Valley, compiles some his best essays with the same perspective that he brings to each essay – an impulse to find the subtle convergences in the mundane.
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My Affairs Are Just My Questions
And it is a voice—perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience—that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.
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A People of Savage Sentimentality
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead should be hailed not simply as a fabulous piece of writing but as a landmark debut of a new genre, invented by others but perfected here.
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Write What You Don’t Know
Ann Beattie’s collagist new novel, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, questions the inherent value of fiction.
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An Angel Pricked With Breathing Holes
Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals.
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Sitting In
Will Boast’s debut story collection, Power Ballads, is tied together by a compelling and evolving drummer named Tim, who will stay with you long after you finish the book.
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You Simply Die of Want
The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice.
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Imported Comedy
Playwright Alan Bennett set his sights on fiction in his new comedic collection, Smut.
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Speech Fever
Ben Marcus’ fourth novel, The Flame Alphabet, uses well-worn myths as a way to expose and explore the pressing questions that we often forget thrum at the heart of our most common traditions and rituals.
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Denied the Work of Natural Generation
Haunted by the paradoxes associated with Shakerism that both glorified and doomed it, Kirchwey uses the place of Mount Lebanon to explore a layering of spaces and themes that accesses vast time and situation.