Reviews
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Until There Is No Next Thing
Imagination is not simply a bulwark in Cradle Book; it is a means through which Teicher actively transcends the blight suffered throughout the work.
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Fission Accomplished
A collection of linked stories set at Fort Hood convey the loneliness and strain experienced by military families.
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I Felt a Need to Touch Someone
An aspiring writer’s memoir of September 11 focuses on the strangeness of life in New York City before and after the attack.
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Your Frills Are Made of Bone
The Haunted House… tumbles through a teenage-girl world, giddy and feverish, at times drunk on foiled friendships and empty kisses, and at others sober with the knowledge that this tumultuous frolic is lamentably (thankfully?) temporary.
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The Intimates
Ralph Sassone’s first novel explores the devastating emotional craters of first love, and the bumpy, baffling relations between the generations.
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The Foreign Skin of the Familiar
What’s most delightful is how Rader balances the heaviness of that observation against the lightness of the characters of Frog and Toad. Absurdity and lyricism, humor and serious contemplation, bump up against one another in pleasing ways.
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Only Human
“For days after the birth Treadway knew there was a secret. He felt the secret exactly as he felt the presence of a white ptarmigan behind him in the snow, and he knew a decision had to be made.”
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Dear Ruins of Our Future Selves
Wetzsteon’s formal style mixed with her populist vernacular is unmistakable and unforgettable.
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The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
Levithan’s rhapsody is just that: an ode to desire written as an account of the traces such desire leaves behind.
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Two Books from Helen Vendler
Long time Rumpus Reviewer Barbara Berman examines the two latest offerings from critic Helen Vendler, one on Emily Dickinson and the other on the last books from five of the 20th century’s finest poetic voices.
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The Known World
Reviewing Sunset Park, I am behaving like a Paul Auster character, imagining a dialogue with a famous author, wondering about the ways fiction and reality overlap…”
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The Complicated World of Adults
A volume of new and selected stories by Edith Pearlman reveal the subtleties of her characters’ inner lives—and the surehanded mastery of their author.