A Clouded Thing
Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-winning novel conveys the hard-knock world of horseracing in a style reminiscent of Walker Percy and Mark Twain.
Reviews
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Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
For [Christian] Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget he is reading poetry.
You Know Nothing of My Work!
Douglas Coupland’s new biography of Marshall McLuhan bends the rules of the medium—but what, exactly, is the message?
From Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the…
Animal Farm
The residents of the Rancho Armadillo commune share everything, but soon discover that people, like chickens and pigs, are “not rational beings.”
Monkey Bars
The result of Lippman’s perpetual contentiousness is a collection that is confrontational in the best sense of the word, interrogating the reader, himself, and America pretty much as a whole…
Polar Bear in Paradise
The protagonist of T Cooper’s short novel is an ambitious, self-destructive, porn-loving, totally sympathetic… bear.
Hammer and Landslide, an Exhilaration
Watson’s skill here, as on so many pages, is to be accessible and kinetic while seeing something new in a common experience. Her sight is so unique, her inner editor…
The Way We Live Now
Two recent books by Asian American writers confront stereotypes while exploring the rich interiority of the characters’ lives.
Get Off Your Ass and Blow Shit Up
The Avian Gospels is a strange, compelling parable about an authoritarian city-state, an underground resistance, and a plague of mysterious birds.
Walking Shadows
A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs.