Reviews
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The Country Where No One Ever Dies
The Albanian, in Ornela Vorpsi’s comic novel, is someone prone to megalomania, and who has one obsession “dearer to them than death… Fornication.”
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The Professor
In a new book of essays, Terry Castle rips through literary and cultural allusions at breakneck speed, citing obscure folk musicians and cult novelists in the same breath.
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Usher
B. H. Fairchild fuses mundane with spiritual in resolute ways, as “in the silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant,” a glorious line that would have been less so if the words “rain” and “abundant” were switched
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Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Amy Bloom’s characters are glorious, endearing wrecks—vain, horny, bullheaded, and brave. They resemble everyone we’ve ever known intimately.
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Lie to Me
The latest memoir of the 2008 Presidential campaign is a fake book about fake events by a fake political operative.
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The Bigness of the World
There’s a lot to smile at in The Bigness of the World, Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Conner Award-winning collection—but there aren’t a lot of jokes. In fact, over the course of a dozen stories, Ostlund presents all kinds of suffering: death,…
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“I tried to remember your scent as your own”
A collection like Ohio Violence is best consumed in small doses, so that its imaginative density, which is never ponderous, can be absorbed.
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The Truth Is Out There
Wormwood, Nevada, the latest novel by David Oppegaard, is the story of Tyler and Anna Mayfield, who transplant from Omaha, Nebraska, to their temporary home in central Nevada.
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Continental Divide
Kurt Caswell’s memoir describes his year teaching in a place of violence, despair, doubt… and hope.
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The Interrogative Mood
“Does integrity lie in failure?” asks the narrator of Padgett Powell’s new novel. He hopes that it does.
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Forgetting English
This brief collection of stories, winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, takes readers around the world to examine familiar relationships without geographical boundaries.
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Fog Is Also Good for This
Jamie Iredell weaves a drug-and-alcohol fueled journey out of brief, vivid bursts of language.