Reviews
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Every Town, USA
“Our world is fragmented, Amanda Eyre Ward seems to say, in all the ways that it might be. I’m going to put it back together for you, slowly. Take my hand.”
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Where Celebrities Go to Die
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler takes a crack at the underworld in a hit-and-miss new novel.
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Poems for the Gmail Generation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture.
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Sympathy for These Devils
Drug addicts, pimps, whores, misogynists, hoodlums… all the usual suspects inhabit the stories in Irvine Welsh’s new collection.
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Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing
Lydia Peelle’s stories focus on scurrilous ne’er-do-wells who flail about in circumstances beyond their control.
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Diary of a Young Survivor
A playwright’s first novel takes on adolescence and grief in a post-9/11 world
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If Only Nothing Would Grow
It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention—Nog honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life.
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A Disobedient Girl
A first novel about a Sri Lankan servant girl brings to life a vivid world of class differences, and restores dignity to characters who are often shoved to the sidelines.
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An Inside Passage
Kurt Caswell’s award-winning essays channel Phillip Lopate and David Foster Wallace, while exploring the plight of a “mountain man” stuck in a paved-over world.
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A Vestige Stirred By Light
The Next Settlement has a rock-solid American quality that compares favorably to William Carlos Williams. Think Plymouth and ocean waves constantly changing, hypnotic in part because of the mysteries beneath.
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Crown of Sonnets
An anthology of stories from the new Russia shows the continuity between contemporary writers and their canonical predecessors
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A History of Violence
In After the Fire a Small Still Voice, love is a difficult, vulnerable salvation—its troubled characters aren’t sure it’s worth the risk.