Reviews
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A Gate at the Huh?
Despite this novel’s serious flaws, it is a gratifying experience. You don’t so much read Lorrie Moore’s books as inhabit them—after which they inhabit you.
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A New Cult of Domesticity
The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
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Wild Kingdom
“Lydia Millet is one of the loosest writers I know. Her work takes rare risks with subject matter and form, and does so with a sense of jazzy improvisation.”
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Rooms of Their Own
Three generations of women cope with isolation, grief, and sex, in the first novel by the celebrated story writer, Rachel Sherman.
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The Organization of Pain and Joy
Tom Healy’s first collection of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, is fashioned entirely of artful silence and alluring reticence.
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Fables of the Reconstruction
With patience reminiscent of Tolstoy, Cornelia Nixon weaves a tapestry of events to explain how an ordinary girl in post-Civil War Maryland kills her lover and gets away with it.
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John Dies at the End
An expanded on-line novel aimed at the teenage-slacker demo offers one too many penis jokes and pop-culture shout outs.
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Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
Let’s face it: Even when you’re breaking up with a Dungeon Master who used to call you his “Faerie Dragon,” you still know you’re breaking up.
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Now You See It…
The Art of Disappearing has been compared to The Time Traveler’s Wife, but Ivy Pochoda’s prose is lusher, her characters more melancholy, her style more mysterious.
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In the Fallow Air
Joanna Rawson is a piercingly passionate, necessary artist. The riches in Unrest are as demanding as they are beautiful.
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Going Away Shoes
Eleven stories from Jill McCorkle show the humor to be found in desperation—and vice versa.
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Life Underwater
The heroine of Nicola Keegan’s debut novel is an Olympic athlete who tries to swim against the current of her tragic family life.