A Life Spasming with Furious Longing
The Salt Ecstasies is really just a beautiful book of poetry, filled with blindingly fierce imagery and destructively skillful writing, but it’s most importantly an honest book, its poems written…
Reviews
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The Duke of Discomfort
David Means’s fictional worlds are ominous, pre-apocalyptic, the hiss after a match is struck but before it ignites.
The Loneliest Thing on Earth
Miguel Syjuco’s novel, Ilustrado won the Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript. A Filipino American reviewer considers the fate of Filipino writing in the American literary world.
The Storm of Life
In a series of violent encounters, Peter Nathaniel Malae’s debut novel asks, What are we to do with men?
The Poetry of Polar Exploration
Elizabeth Bradfield’s passion for her subject and her acuity and great sensitivity to language make Approaching Ice a fine collection that will fit nicely on shelves of natural history books…
This is More than Poetry.
Grotesquery is the nature of the humor in The Black Automaton.… [Douglas] Kearney leads the reader through laughter at the unchangeable rottenness of life, rather than throwing a tearful pity…
Pitt on Parker
The Rumpus assigned “dueling reviews” to the authors of two new short story collections. It didn’t really work out so well.
Pedal Pusher
A popular cycling blog spawns a humorous book about mental and physical survival on big city streets.
The Drunk Sonnets
Like most winning drunken acts, The Drunk Sonnets is comprised of extremes. I came away from each poem thinking it was either the best damn thing I’d read in years…
From Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.