Fourth Down and Longing
A memoir of life as a disappointed fan becomes a meditation on “isolation and the things we do to overcome our loneliness… emptiness, and not knowing how to fill it.”
Reviews
2612 posts
Stumbling into Immensity
Ted Gilley’s short story collection, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, maps grief’s breathless journey from haunted to home safe.
It Begins to Look Like Courtesy
Carl Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying.
Triumph and Oblivion
José Saramago’s posthumous novel The Elephant’s Journey is an exploration of the self—and a gift to his readers.
Tinkering With the Closed Box
Cyborgia is wildly imaginative and the poems don’t take themselves too seriously. Even when these women are being constructed or destroyed, the book isn’t particularly angry or even political. It…
It Ninja-Stars Me
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of…
Between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era.
Renewed, Transfigured
Like boxes in storage, Andrea Scrima’s memories are itinerant. Wherever she resides, nothing seems to be in the right place.
The Range of Your Amazing Nothing
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be…
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
Am I a Redundant Human Being?
A lost literary voice from early 1900s Austria slyly addresses female self-loathing and finds answers with unsettling modern relevance.
Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.