Reviews
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The Night is a God’s Wound
This [collection] is a rare effort to “open the window” for western readers onto the last fifty years of Chinese poetics.
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God Bless Steve Almond
In Steve Almond’s new story collection, God Bless America, Almond does what he does best—eviscerate and then forgive our pitiful culture of excess.
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The Force That Drives All Flesh
Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls is a case study for how to observe, recall and (possibly) create from whole cloth with clarity that never becomes brittle.
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The Middle
In Dagoberto Gilb’s new collection of short stories, Before the End, After the Beginning, we see people in transitional phases―neither flying nor drowing, but floating.
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The Winner Returns
A 1972 novel recently re-released, Rosalyn Drexler’s To Smithereens plays with fact and imagination, memoir and fiction, in ways seldom seen in her own era.
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Everything Tastes Better When It’s Precious
[An] unrequited love of language is demonstrated throughout The Hermit, as the speakers of the poems seem to continually give and love openly, but are often left hurting or alone—left to their prisons.
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Philosopher or Dog?
Andrew O’Hagan’s playful novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend, Marilyn Monroe follows one terrier around the mid-20th century as he pontificates on Plutrach, Nietzsche, and acting.
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Looking for Hymns of Seizure
There is some of Rilke’s spiritual longing in Basil, expressed most frequently through agonizing bodies and food.
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The Discerning Eye
Rosamond Bernier’s new memoir, Some of My Lives, opens up her intriguing life as a friend and critic of renowed artists of the 20th century.
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What Began As a Love Letter…
Warmed and Bound, an anthology of neo-noir fiction, offers 38 dark and beautiful stories from Matt Bell, Blake Butler, and others.
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Observe as Meat Falls
This collection is not kind or nice, but the brutality of his honesty, the blunt force of his handling of subject matter, and most importantly, his emotional transparency, make this strong collection incredibly effective and worth reading and rereading.
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Why not read Moby-Dick?
Historian Nathaniel Philbrick lays out a convincing, if scholarly, case for why Moby-Dick is relevant to modern audiences.