Reviews
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California Dreaming
Eric Puchner’s first novel exposes the faultlines and frustrations beneath the shining American dream.
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Outside of Society
Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe chronicles two “mutinous spirits” in the chaos of 1970s New York.
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The World Was Still There
John Haskell’s novel takes readers on a metaphysical journey through the mind of a Steve Martin-impersonator impersonator.
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Crimson Colored Raunchiness and Terror
Taste of Cherry is a beautiful, carefully crafted, and sensual display of poetry; the verbal, pyrotechnical, unabashed bravery of the poems is their most significant quality.
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Stirring Coffee with a Feather
Margo Berdeshevsky’s work straddles the line between fiction and poetry. Her characters grieve, dream, punish themselves, and try to find harmony between who they are and who they might still be.
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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.