Reviews
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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.
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A Struggle at the Roots of the Mind
I don’t know if I’m the only youngish reader to have this chip on my shoulder, but I always sort of assume that poems by older people get mellower. Let me say it again: Rich’s lines are harrowing, are incensed…
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Let’s Float Free in the New Air
Such a surreal experience of the human body pervades See Me Improving. There is as much mystery in sneezing as there is in orgasm.
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
A hedge-fund manager predicts the 2008 financial meltdown, but adds little to our understanding—or our sympathy.
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Lounge Music
This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so [Editor A. J.] Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love.