Reviews
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Teenagers from Mars
Peter Bognanni’s first novel mixes punk rock and the wild creativity of Buckminster Fuller into a tender and believable chronicle of teen sorrow.
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Postcards from the Edge
“Big American Trip addresses our insecurities as artists, lovers, and citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak.”
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Twenty and Bored and Alive
This voice is neither howl, yowl, nor whisper, but something more like a quiet monotone, slightly ironic and yet also depressed, lonely and, at times, compellingly vulnerable.
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The Cost of Living
A new volume of stories by Mavis Gallant traces the writer’s development from early stories of bewilderment and disappointment to the sharp, incisive later work of a master.
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Heart of Glass
Ali Shaw’s novel concerns a modern-day Midas, a cold and inhospitable island, and a young woman whose body is inexorably transforming.
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Mutations of Meaning
A first novel by playwright Jillian Weise tackles the moral and ethical questions surrounding both medical research and human relationships.
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The Ancient Book of Hip
The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.
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The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Dreams, vignettes, hypotheticals, and poetry lay out alternate versions of Western literature’s founding epic.
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Why Me?
Heidi W. Durrow’s novel is both the story of a woman learning to negotiate biracial life and that of the lone survivor of a horrible tragedy.
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The LA Times Book Awards
The LA Times has announced the finalists for their book awards, and we’re pleased that we’ve reviewed a number of them here at The Rumpus. I’m particularly proud that we got 3 of the 5 nominees for first fiction: Tinkers…
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Anywhere But L.A.
In stories that range through history, serendipity, speculation, whimsy, and horror, Daniel Olivas chronicles the lives of characters who have loved—and lost—Los Angeles.
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Slouching Towards Baltimore
Geoffrey Becker’s second novel races across the country in the company of “spiritual beings having a human experience.”