Reviews
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The Lightness of Sidney Wade
Her lightness is not merely pointing out the details of the world but showing us that without the glory of the everyday, the parsnip, for instance, there can be no weight lifted.
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Losing Mum and Pup, A Liberal’s Guilty Pleasure
I wonder, when a humorist writes a book not intended for laughs. When, say, the very funny satirist, Christopher Buckley, writes a memoir – say, Losing Mum and Pup – about the deaths of his legendary parents in 2007 and…
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Do Not Deny Me
The stories in Do Not Deny Me, Jean Thompson’s new collection, are concerned with main characters whose lives are scraped bare, who live in a world flattened by boredom and limitation.
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Occupational Hazards by Jonathan Segura: An Ex-Girlfriend’s Review
I feel as if I’ve earned the right to review Occupational Hazards. Jonny and I have already loved and hated each other.
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Six Feet Under
The protagonist of Jim Krusoe’s new novel looks for his mother—in the afterlife, or in Cleveland.
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The Exile and the Nomad Are Cousins: The Rumpus Original Combo with Ana Menendez
Ana Menendez’s new novel, The Last War, deals with Iraq, infidelity, self-deception, and exile.
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The Camera Never Lies
In Steve Amick’s new novel, desire is most effectively stoked by what you can’t see.
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The Solipsist and the Internet (a review of Helprin’s Digital Barbarism)
Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist.
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“Inch of ocean, pinch of face”
Like the razor-edged minimalism of Robert Creeley, the rich ontology of these poems, where the content and form eloquently match, communicates carefully into the reader’s memory.
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Sexual Healing?
Women are nasty. They piss, and fart, and masturbate. They clean toilet seats with their vaginas and pull out tampons with barbeque tongs.
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The Best Music is Made of Subtraction
Like the Jazz, Blues, and R&B music Brown references, these poems are born of heartbreak, explorations of love and violence, connections and disconnections, the vast complications of body and heart.
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What Is Found
In Patrick Somerville’s novel, an expectant father must decide what kind of man he wants to be.