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LATEST REVIEWS! JUST IN!
*Camille-Yvette Welsch reviews This is Not Chick Lit edited by Elizabeth Merrick: In May 2006, the New York Times announced the best work in American fiction in the last twenty-five years. The paper asked dozens of writers and critics to respond with a single title that might merit "best." Though Toni Morrisson's Beloved topped the list, only one other woman writer, Marilynne Robinson, made the top twenty-five. Interestingly, the Times also noted that 69% of respondents were men. What does this say about the state of women writing literary fiction? And, why are men so much more likely to respond to such a poll?
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*Steve Himmer reviews Crawl Space by Edie Meidav: Edie Meidav isn't the first novelist to write in the voice of an unlikeable narrator, but she may be among the boldest. Crawl Space, follow-up to her debut The Far Field, is narrated by Emile Poulquet, a French Nazi collaborator responsible for deporting the Jews of Finier where he served as prefect during World War II. Half a century later, after a string of aliases, disguising surgeries, and false lives, Emile survives one trial intended to hold him accountable for his past and flees Paris to escape a second attempt.
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*Patricia Payette reviews The Meaning of Night: A Confession by Michael Cox:
When I reached page 676 of Michael Cox's new novel The Meaning of Night: A Confession, my heart began to pound and I didn't stop to catch my breath. The last time I had this kind of reaction to a novel, Mr. Rochester was in the drawing room confessing his love for Jane Eyre. Although Cox cleverly keeps his two principles--Edward Glyver and Phoebus Rainsford Daunt--physically apart for the bulk of the novel, he masterfully binds their fates by spinning around these two young men a web of Victorian mystery, betrayal, and murder, so when the two meet face to face at the conclusion of the book, the climatic moment and its aftermath are deeply satisfying for the reader.
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*John A. Mangarella reviews A FICTIONAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES with huge chunks missing edited by T Cooper & Adam Mansbach: The hilarious introduction to A Fictional History of the United States quickly and sadly underlines why we seem to keep reliving events from which we should be able to protect ourselves. As editors T Cooper and Adam Mansbach point out through their wonderful selection of stories, the U.S.A. is one ultra contradictory place that can leave even the most brilliant scratching their heads while the high school drop out understandsand vice versa. The chose articles by seventeen of America's finest writers covering the emergence of the country from 2000 B.C.E. to 2010 A.D.
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*Pedro Ponce reviews The Joy of Funerals by Alix Strauss: While billed as a novel in stories, Alix Strauss' The Joy of Funerals may at first confuse readers expecting the character-driven unity of Ursula Hegi's Floating in My Mother's Palm or Lucinda Rosenfeld's What She Saw. . . Eight of the book's nine stories feature different protagonists, each dealing with a kind of bereavement.
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*Margaret Foley reviews Offshore: The Dark Side of the Global Economy by William Brittain-Catlin:
n Offshore, William Brittain-Catlin uses a detailed study of the Cayman Islands to effectively show the cost of offshore tax havens. If you've ever wanted to know the ins-and-outs of corporate tax shelters, this book provides a detailed explanation. Brittain-Catlin's analyses of the multinational uses of these tax havens vividly illustrate how the road to corporate ruin, economic collapse, and huge profits run through places like the Cayman Islands. In fact, there is an entire international system that allows companies to hide both profits and losses.
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*Daisy Levy reviews New Stories from the South: 2006 The Year's Best edited by Allan Gurganus: In the words of one of the South's reigning queens of literature, Eudora Welty, good fiction should teach us "not how to conduct our behavior, but how to feel." So quotes this year's New Stories from the South guest editor Allan Gurganus in his introduction. According to Gurganus, fiction is meant for more than distraction, or escape.
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*Cara Seitchek reviews Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes by T Cooper: T Cooper's latest book is an interesting blend of fiction and non-fiction, using historical events such as Charles Lindbergh's famous flight across the Atlantic as anchors for a broader family story. The writing is crisp and fluid, with realistic dialogue and descriptive settings, and while a bit on the long side (400+ pages), moves forward at a good pace.
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*Matthew Tiffany reviews Who I Was Supposed to Be by Susan Perabo: Susan Perabo provides a fine, engrossing example of the strength of the supposedly "worn out" short story form in her collection "Who I Was Supposed to Be." There are no postmodern hijinks here to throw off people who just want a story with their story; Perabo delivers clean, engaging stories that move from start to finish without demanding thought.
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*Joshua Citrak reviews Fifteen Minutes by Mark Connelly: Everybody wants their fifteen minutes. As an American, in a culture of reality television, instant fame is almost considered a right. People will eat goat brains, marry strangers and swap wives just to get a chance see themselves on TV. Almighty television is a projection of all our affirmations and expectations. To see oneself on it, in no matter what state or context, often has one convinced that they have officially become somebody.
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*Cara Seitchek reviews Instant Love by Jami Attenberg: In clean, spare prose, Jami Attenberg's story collection, Instant Love, recounts the travails of three young women as they search for that often-elusive connection with someone else.
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*John A. Mangarella reviews Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became A National Obsession by Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing: Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing chose the July 4, 2003 opening weekend for three studio blockbusters to illustrate the circuitous route of studio financing through advertiser to theater to ticket buyer and back again in their collaborative effort, Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became A National Obsession. Haye and Bing show us how deeply, if subtly loud, the studios touch our lives. "Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines" "Legally Blond 2, Red, White and Blond" and "Sinbad, The Legend of the Seven Seas" collided on that long Fourth of July weekend, each hoping to gather more legs than the legendary summer movie, "Jaws."
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*Pedro Ponce reviews The Last Days of Dead Celebrities by Mitchell Fink: The Media is too often a convenient scapegoat. Whether you're a parent concerned about violence on TV, or a pundit protesting the negative coverage (or lack thereof) muddling a nation's foreign policies, the Media somehow manages to lurk behind it all. What is overlooked in such glib reasoning is the fact that such a monster would not exist without an audience to sustain it, an audience of readers and viewers figured all too simplistically as its passive victims.
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*Steve Himmer reviews Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich: Compared to other ways of writing history, oral history is often complicated by the absence a single narrative vision to guide the reader's sense of which observers are most worth attention, and how their observations combine into "The Truth." When historical subjects are allowed to speak for themselves, it is more difficult to assuage the confusion and contradiction, which, while organic parts of human experience, are often erased in the recounting.
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*Camille-Yvette Welsch reviews Human Oddities by Noria Jablonski: In Jablonski's debut, the title only tells half the story, half of any story in the book. Yes, conjoined twins, exploding tummy tucks, transvestites, exhibitionists, severed monkey hands are not the norm; however, much of the angst, self-consciousness and terror are human commonalities. Jablonski asks a series of what if questions, in the way that all good fiction must: what if the conjoined Hilton sisters walked into your hair salon? What if your father dies, and you are a masochist, where will your grieving takes its outlet? What if a nice old man asks to take your infant brother for a walk? What if you find a severed monkey hand? What separates these stories is often the complication of the body with all its often virulent juices and desires.
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*Amy Havel reviews The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller: Former Esquire literary editor Adrienne Miller proves, through The Coast of Akron, that she's comfortable on either side of the editing desk; innovation, voice, and wit predominate in this work, and show that her mastery of these elements is solid. The novel is big and blustery and quite dense, with a major aspect of Miller's style being an adherence to exact details. Characters, places, objects: all are described with minute and creative specificity and help to create a certain point of view which seems almost as important to the story as the plot.
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*Steve Himmer reviews Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro: In Alan DeNiro's story "Our Byzantium," the narrator exhorts the reader, "This is literal; don't construe this as a metaphor." He is referring to the appearance of a halo around his now-estranged lover, but may well be describing the stories in DeNiro's debut collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. These stories traverse borders between the realistic and the fantastic so smoothly as to render those borders irrelevant, disarming the reader of easy distinctions and forcing them beyond what they think they know about fiction and life alike, and into imagining new possibilities for each.
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*Cara Seitchek reviews Pretty Little Dirty by Amanda Boyden: Pretty Little Dirty is a bold, coming-of-age story that follows the entwined lives of Lisa and Celeste from their pre-teen years to college. While at times gritty and dark, the underlying friendship and affection between the girls remains strong and realistic as they confront school, peer pressure, distant parents, boy-girl relationships, and growing up.
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*Patricia R. Payette reviews The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century by Anne Kingston: After the vows have been said, the rice has been thrown and the newlyweds ride off into the sunset, what is a modern woman to make of her new role as wife? What is our new century to make of the iconic figure of wife? The Meaning of Wife is Anne Kingston's carefully researched and highly accessible examination of the social, political and personal consequences of how we as a culture and as individuals define, refine and confine the "wife."
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*Margaret Foley reviews Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel: Whenever I finish a book by Hilary Mantel, I also close it with a deep sense of enjoyment. Her latest novel, Beyond Black, is no exception. Beyond Black, like much of Mantel's work is a dark comedy-humor combined with satire and social commentary.
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*Laurence Dumortier reviews Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go is half sci-fi and half not. Science fiction and literature are not, of course, mutually exclusive, so I don't mean to suggest that it's the quality of the writing that distinguishes it from the genre, it's more a split in the focus of the story. The book is concerned with three former students of Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school in the English countryside.
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*Pedro Ponce reviews Novels 1926-1929 by William Faulkner: Being a classic is a dubious distinction. Never mind the thorny issue of exactly what a classic is, who decides it, and why it deserves a place on the syllabus. The so-called classic is repackaged, reformatted, and, in effect, removed from everyday circulation for permanent display on the shelves of posterity. But as with anything on display, an air of sterility surrounds its presumed excellence. Like the forgotten entre at the back of the freezer, we're glad to have it around, but it's not the first thing we reach for when we're hungry.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews My Sister's Continent by Gina Frangello: Gina Frangello's novel, the searing story of identical twins Kendra and Kirby Braun, is bittersweet, compassionate, vulnerable, and honest. Kirby is the narrator, but as she notes in the letter that opens the story, "Here is [...] my rewrite of your case study: our version." The "you" she addresses throughout the tale is Dr. Susan Friedland, who has counseled both Kirby and her father Henry; the duplicity of "our version" refers to the shared experiences of Kirby and Kendra.
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*Amy Havel reviews Adverbs by Daniel Handler: The playful writing style of Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, transcends children's literature and rests on the subject of adult love, its downfalls and its (occasional) pleasures. In Adverbs, which is billed as a novel, each chapter addresses a relationship of one kind or another at a crucial crossroads, using adverbial titles, i.e. "Frigidly" "Wrongly", and "Not Particularly", to describe the nature of the action. The novel progresses in a barely linear fashion, flip-flopping through characters' developments and intertwining previously unrelated characters in surprising ways. This technique creates a lot of fun for the reader; the satisfaction of seeing indirectly how one relationship or character turned out works well to keep the book unpredictable.
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*Joshua Citrak reviews Articles of War by Nick Arvin: There are many great heroic tales captured by book, film or the hand-me-down oral traditions told at the local V.F.W. of bravery and sacrifice from the common men of America's "Greatest Generation" in its greatest test, World War II. But, Nick Arvin's first novel, Articles of War, spins a different story hung on a familiar background. One of a farm boy enlistee, good with a rifle, willing to take orders, who, once shipped off to France to fight the Germans, confronts not the enemy, but his own cowardice and deserter tendencies instead.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham: Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days is overwhelming in the most positive sense, not only in its various temporal contexts (the first section of the novel takes place during the Industrial Revolution, the second in present day, and the third is pitched far into the future), but also in the opulence of the language. It is appropriate that Walt Whitman's verse, and even Whitman himself, appear repeatedly in this story, because there is a thematic concordance between what Cunningham seems to pursue here, and what Whitman offers, according to Rita Dunn, an NYU professor who appears in the second section of the novel. " '[Whitman] didn't just celebrate himself,' " Rita says.
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*Patrick Hunnicutt reviews Jack Fish by J Milligan: J Milligan's Jack Fishis a sci-fi noir that manages to be both hard-boiled and absurdly funny. It took me a couple of pages to swallow the novel's wacky premise, that the hero, Jack Fish, is indeed a kind of fish, or aquaman, sent to New York from the lost City of Atlantis (underwater somewhere off the coast of New England) to assassinate a rogue spy named Victor Sargasso. Wearing only his mankini, he comes ashore on a Coney Island beach where he immediately begins the first part of his mission, learning to breathe air.
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*Laurence Dumortier reviews Selected Poems: 1931-2004 by Czeslaw Milosz: Czeslaw Milosz reminds me of Philip Roth - publishing young and brilliantly; improving with age; equally engaged by moral responsibilities and carnal pleasures; haunted by his childhood home, a place so changed it has all but disappeared.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi: Helen Oyeyemi's first novel explores the world of eight-year old Jessamy Harrison, who is miserably, decidedly different than her peers at school in London. Her mother, Sarah (or Bisi) is Nigerian, and her father, Daniel, is English. She is prone to horrible fevers, and she is bookish. She is shunned and scorned by popular girls, and even by her cousin Dulcie. But when a wild, magical force called TillyTilly reveals that Jess had a stillborn twin sister, Jess's torment becomes far more complicated.
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*Jane Carr reviews The Dancing Bear (poems) by Laura McCullough: At first glance, Laura McCullough's new collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, seems almost ungainly, with an entropy of formal architecture, a bottleneck of epigraphs and a deeply human longing, unmediated and stripped clean of the lyric precision typical of contemporary work. The frontal image of the poem, the dancing bear, gestures simultaneously toward the fanciful and the primitive, which seem perfectly cast as representative of the extremes facing the poether intelligence, performance, perhaps even tricks, balanced against her instinct.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews Omaha Blues by Joseph Lelyveld: Joseph Lelyveld's Omaha Bluesuses memory as a resource for the stories of his family and his childhood, but recollection is not his sole concern. In flawless, understated prose, he seeks to revise the memories he has, through investigation, pilgrimage, and rumination. He refers to "the serpentine course of these pages," adding, "History may be linear but memory, at least mine, isn't; it runs in loops." Despite this warning, the structure of the work is far from disorienting. Rather, the reader is swept through the repetitions of Lelyveld's personal struggles: his move from city to city as the son of a busy rabbi and a mother who writhed against the constraints of her maternal responsibilities.
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*Amy Havel reviews The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean: In 1941, the Germans surrounded Leningrad and began what would become the 900-day siege of that city. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation and exposure, and the event itself would become one of the most atrocious in Russian (and world) history. For Marina, the main character of Debra Dean's debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, the siege was not only historical but personal, as she experienced it once in her young life and, again, through her fading memory while in the grips of Alzheimer's disease.
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*Laura McCullough reviews Femme au Chapeau (poems) by Rachel Dacus : This well-pedigreed book takes its title from the Henri Matisse painting of the same name. In the painting (which graces Dacus' book cover, so there's no doubt of what the painting evokes in her title poem), Matisse's wife, like many wives of men dubbed great in their discipline by history, is nameless; her role as wife is the key here. Dacus' title poem describes her, but also locates her both in her own time and in ours. The final questions she asks: "If we can't escape birth or condition,/ what's the point? If not now, when?/ Who's will I be, Henri, when I come to fruition?/ as a woman all rainbow atomic ignition" are clearly the central questions of the book's speaker.
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*Matthew Tiffany reviews Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani: After writing a critically-acclaimed, book club novel, an author has two choices of what to do next -- one can go from launching unmanned satellites to putting a man on the moon (Jeffrey Eugenidies's Middlesex as an example nine years in the making) or one can work toward something small, focused and precise. Abani's follow-up is not an ambitious, mainstream novel about a sex change, it's a fine novella about a young woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother while being forced into prostitution.
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*Pedro Ponce reviews Tin God by Terese Svoboda and Skin by Kellie Wells: The Flyover Fiction Series, published by the University of Nebraska Press, takes its name from the stereotypical view of the Midwest as an anonymous expanse between coasts. Two recently added fiction titles ably demonstrate the series' real purposeintroducing readers to the Midwest as literary landmark.
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*Patricia Payette reviews The Bill from My Father by Bernard Cooper and Falling Through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni: Who is this man I call my father? How do I sort out the messy, bubbling mixture of love and fear and respect and anger that I feel for this man? These questions underlie two recent memoirs written by adult children of their respective late fathersÑboth men whose demanding, difficult, unpredictable personalities make them compelling memoir subjects even as the books expose and enumerate their failures as fathers and human beings.
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*Margaret Foley reviews Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress's Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London's Wild and Wicked Theatrical World by Kathryn Shevelow: The history of the theater in eighteenth-century England is a history of flamboyant personalities, one of whom was Charlotte Charke (1716-1760). She initially achieved fame as an actress and later achieved notoriety when she began to wear men's clothes off the stage. Kathryn Shevelow's Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress's Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London's Wild and Wicked Theatrical World treats us not only to a well-researched and entertaining biography of a controversial character, but also to the fascinating theater world.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews His Lovely Wife by Elizabeth Dewberry: Wisely, author Elizabeth Dewberry sets the story of Ellen Baxter, an Atlanta housewife, on the periphery of a physics conference in Paris. Ellen's husband, Nobel laureate Lawrence Baxter, expects her to fulfill her role as "His Lovely Wife" a role in which she is attractive, present, and effectively silent. When Ellen arrives in Paris, and her car pulls up to her hotel, she is briefly mistaken for Princess Diana, and for a moment she stands beneath the flash of countless photographers. She sees that "the photographers were completely ignoring" her husband, and thinks, "This is crazy. He's the Nobel laureate. If they had any idea who either of us was, they'd be photographing him." But in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, which occurs while the Baxters are in Paris, Ellen is stirred to ruminations about her own role as a "trophy wife."
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*Kim Nicole reviews Dwelling Places by Vinita Hampton Wright: Dwelling Places is an ode to rural America that not even this native New Yorker and atheist can resist. From the very first sentence, Wrights fictionalized Iowa town, courtesy of her strikingly vivid descriptions, immediately draws the reader into the story. The book is set against a backdrop of cornstalk-lined country roads and brilliant sunsets, in sharp contrast to the lives of her characters, which are anything but idyllic.
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*Joanna Pearson reviews American Smooth (poems) by Rita Dove: Dove has threaded together a collection of poems tied by movement, rhythm, music, and flightthe elements of danceand yet she frequently departs from the dance floor. With improvisational surefootedness, she is also biblical, historical, and personal. The poems in this collection are smooth; but more than anything, though, these poems are Americanwhatever multifaceted meaning that word hasand it is this American-ness that Dove is interested in exploring.
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*John A. Mangarella reviews House of Many Gods by Kiana Davenport: I grew up on massive novels that spanned the globe while connecting concepts with the type of internet speed that links people. There was a fire beneath such novels and that Kiana Davenports House Of Many Gods possesses. Its a novel of Hawaii, of the people of Hawaii in a time long after Pearl Harbor, long after the fall of the Soviet Union and but just in time for all that atomic testing and toxic dumping to take root within the islanders and begin killing off a people that had survived the world for a millenium yet have not the strength to last out this fragile, tragic century.
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*Patrick Hunnicutt reviews Too Late To Die Young by Harriet McBryde Johnson:
It's surprising to learn early on in Harriet Johnson's memoir, Too Late To Die Young, that there is a contingent of disabled people who despise the annual Jerry Lewis telethon. Some, including Johnson, who herself has a muscle disease, go so far as to attach cardboard signs to their wheelchairs and scoot around the venue chanting protest slogans, their complaint being that the telethon generates pity more than it does money. Pity, other peoples pity as well as her own, is Harriet Johnsons worst enemy.
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*Cara Seitchek reviews Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster: Jen Lancaster's Bitter is the New Black, at first glance, appears to be just another title in the growing list of "chick-lit" books, but instead creates a sub-genre that is both distinctive and hilarious. Lancaster's book is a memoir, and while it does read like fiction, the underlying reality of the author's story gives the book a depth and strength that chick-lit novels can lack. Bitter is the New Black is an excellent example of creative non-fiction, in that it blends fiction and non-fiction techniques into a satisfying read.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen: Author, Sara Gruen, lingers in the tents long after the gaping crowd has dispersed in Water for Elephants, the lovely, comic, resounding story of a traveling train circus. When Jacob Jankowski's parents die in a car accident, he cannot focus on his final exams at Cornell, where he is studying to become a veterinarian.
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*Laurence Dumortier reviews Gilead by Marilynne Robinson: I should perhaps have been forewarned by the blurbs on the back of Gilead that hailed it as "radiant,' "incandescent," "rapturous," "lyrical," "astonishing" and "perfect" but I have been burned before by stupendous comments that accompany rather ordinary books. I should have taken into account Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping, generally regarded as a contemporary classic. I was not and did not. I picked the book up with my usual mild skepticism. Within a few pages I was crying. It is rare to find anything in American life that is at once tender and scrupulously honest. Gilead is both of these things and encountering it is shocking and revelatory.
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*Amy Havel reviews New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City by Andrei Codrescu: While the personal, economic, and sociological tragedies of Hurricane Katrina continue to weigh heavily on our minds and hearts, the artistic tragedies are just now getting their just bit of air-play. Andrei Codrescu, author and NPR commentator, takes action to this cause with the publication of his complete collection of writings about New Orleans, his (adopted) hometown.
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* Matthew Tiffany reviews My Father's Rifle by Hiner Saleem, Catherine Temerson (Translator): When Azar, the narrator of My Father's Rifle, goes from telling the reader "I was still a child" - as he does repeatedly in the early parts of the book - to "I was no longer a child," the shift is imperceptible. Looking back on the book, there is no one specific point that can be pointed to as the moment of transition. What the reader is given instead is a straightforward, unadorned look at the forces that shape life in a country where no quarter is given for anything – not belief, not language, and not enough breathing room to put together any effective resistance. read more...
*Amy Havel reviews In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic by Howard Norman: In this memoir, Howard Norman, primarily a novelist and author of such works as The Bird Artist and The Haunting of L., documents a friendship he had with Helen Tanizaki almost 30 years ago. Both were sent to Churchill, Manitoba, to translate Inuit folktales, Tanizaki into Japanese and Norman into English, at a time when Norman was, as he openly admits "not very self-reflective". The memoir draws attention to the influence of both this woman and the folktales on Norman's life and his future as a novelist.
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*Kim Nicole reviews Come On In! (New Poems) by Charles Bukowski: We who love Bukowski do so because he effortlessly and simultaneously embodies a swaggering tough guy and a cynical, down-on-his-luck loser, with a charming tinge of melancholy optimism. His unique poetic voice lies at the intersection of these contradictions, giving rise to works lacking in pretension that manage to wring the often heartbreaking essence out of that which might otherwise be considered mundane.
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*Jaclyn Thomas reviews The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau: In The Professor's Daughter, Raboteau writes with raw eloquence and intellectual ferocity. Narrator Emma Boudreaux's tone is admirably fresh and matter-of-fact. Faced with strangers' fascination over her biracial appearance, she draws closer and closer to her brother Bernie. For the most part, Raboteau manages a child's perspective with exactitude and curiosity: Emma gazes at the "metal rainbow" of St. Louis on a road trip, and describes the stillness of a restaurant that refuses to serve her family "like a library, only evil."
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*Laura McCullough reviews Hoops by Major Jackson: In the tradition of Rita Dove and Cornelius Eady, Major Jackson is both a poet and a storyteller. His first book, Leaving Saturn, was the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner and was a Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Jackson was launched through Cave Canem, an organization of African American writers and poets, and certainly his work reflects what some might call an African American imagination and bounces off concerns and specifics relevant to his experience as an African American male. However, to categorize his work as solely that which speaks to race would be an error. If a white reader, for example, were to pass up Hoops because they felt it was "just" about the "Black Experience," they would be making a mistake, one that would deny them the richness of Jackson's poetry, his finely honed sense of craft, his blending of heart and mind.
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*Laurence Dumortier reviews Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang: Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stopis sub-titled "A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" but it might also have been called "America in the Hip-Hop Years." Hip-hop, like all original art forms, was born of a specific time and place-in this case the Bronx in the nineteen seventies-but perhaps more than most art forms it has been a direct response to, even a defense against, hostile historical and sociological forces, and its continued evolution reflects, even as it shapes, the shifting tide of a larger American cultural, political and economic context.
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*Margaret Foley reviews The Hermeneutics of the Subject by Michel Foucault: The idea of the self or how a person constructs subjectivity was one of the major interests of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). In The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1982, Foucault returns to the idea of the self and how it has been constructed in Western thought.
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*David Barringer reviews Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs: As addicted to writing as any self-infatuated caffeinated blogger, Augusten Burroughs puts out one book of "true stories" after another, from Running with Scissors (2003) to Dry (2004) to Magical Thinking (2005) to Possible Side Effects, to be published May 2006. Scissors was one of those books that steadily built a cult of followers, seduced by nothing more than a whisper from a convert, "You have to read this." Burroughs endured a childhood that, if it weren't true, could have only been dreamed up by Aimee Bender, George Saunders and Lemony Snicket: surreal, psychotic, twisted, hilarious. Well, hilarious only because Burroughs lived to tell the tale and, in his memoir, softened the blows with self-deprecating humor.
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*Joshua Citrak reviews American Purgatorio by John Haskell: Granted, a psychoanalytical detective novel written as a meditation on the Seven Deadly Sins, isn't the most original of plot structures. The movies and books made on the subject are many, examining how the sinner is not so different from the saint, and how in a web of mystery and lies, sin can often take the form of virtue. In American Purgatorio, however, we can take confidence in the fact that coolly talented John Haskell constructs a genre-blasting, heart rendering tale of one man's cross-country journey of loss and desire with emotional, yet precise prose.
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*Joanna Pearson reviews Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of Your Loved One by Charles "Chas" Addams: Once when I was in college, I received a series of gifts from a gloomy and disturbed admirer. These included a careful drawing of anatomical hearts that read, "Someday you'll discover that you actually have one," and a series of postcards featuring depressed dinosaurs to which, each time, the admirer would add his own facial features and a few knives with a marker. Reading the Charles "Chas" Addams book Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of Your Loved One was a reminiscent experience. I only wish that my college pal had been aware of Addams, who was clearly his artistic predecessor.
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*Staffers, Jaclyn Thomas and Steven Hansen review Second Language by Ronna Wineburg click here to read both reviews
*Abigail Koons reviews Girly by Elizabeth Merrick: Girly, Elizabeth Merrick's first novel, tells the story of the Hart sisters' tumultuous childhood and the relationships that shape their personalities. From their early childhood in Pennsylvania with their aloof, absent Father to their later years in California alone with their Born Again mother, Ruth and Racinda develop amidst the strong presences of their mother Amandine and their grandmother Button. Their identity is as much who they are as who they aren't. After years of emotional pain and instability, Ruth finally leaves home, allowing her younger sister to emerge from her shadow and make her own mistakes.
* Laurence Dumortier reviews A Taxonomy of Barnacles by Galt Niederhoffer: A Taxonomy of Barnacles is a paean to eccentric domesticity and sibling rivalry. Though reminiscent of both Salinger's Glass family and Wes Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums, Niederhoffer's clan is even more wildly over-the-top in its weirdness and charm. The elaborate set-up is this: at a Passover seder patriarch Barry Barnacle, hosiery magnate, entreats his children, the six girls, Bell, Bridget, Beth, Belinda, Beryl and Benita, and their adopted brother Latrell, to compete for the Barnacle fortune by best ensuring the survival of the family name. read more...
*Steve Himmer reviews Hello to All That by John Falk : The premise of John Falk's memoir, Hello to All That, is at once engaging and absurd: After struggling with severe depression for years, the author finally finds a successful treatment. In order to prove to himself that he is recovered, and to reengage the world at its most extreme, he becomes a freelance war correspondent. Even the most skeletal description of those circumstances invites expectations of, for instance, belabored comparisons of the author's internal battles to the more tangible war he reports on. read more...
*Patricia R. Payette reviews Branwell by Douglas A. Martin: It's almost impossible to read Douglas Martin's new novel Branwell and not be reminded of Virginia Woolf's creation of “Shakespeare's Sister” in her 1929 book A Room of One's Own. Woolf speculates about what might have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister with a similar literary genius to his own. Woolf plays out the imaginary details of the young woman's tragic life—gifted with ambitions and talents for which she had no acceptable social or professional outlet, Shakespeare's imaginary sister is tortured by her “poet's heart…caught and tangled in a woman's body” and takes her own life, her existence negated by a society and history shaped by men. read more...
*Joanna Pearson reviews Part of the Bargain (poems) by Scott Hightower: The words that surround us daily are not always those of poetry—the blinking slogans, sound bits, and hackneyed sayings, the maxims and ad phrases in neon. It is a saturated, quotation-heavy world, with story piled upon story, and not immediately poetic. Unless you are poet Scott Hightower. Hightower's newest collection, Part of the Bargain, revels in these linguistic conventions, exploding aphorisms and detonating familiar phrase, finding a paradoxical expansiveness within what would be, in less skilled hands, confining or clichéd. read more...
Camille-Yvette Welsch reviews The Cultured Handmaiden by Catherine Cookson: Long praised for her English romances and story-telling powers, Cookson does not veer from the formula here; she embraces it, offering another young English woman searching for her way and eventually finding happiness with a nice young man. Still, Cookson does separate herself from the pack. She is no Barbara Cartland, churning out books and barely bothering to change the names and plotlines.read more...
* John A. Mangarella reviews The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell: Finally! A superbly concise autopsy on the reconstruction of the deconstruction of the reconstruction of the deconstruction of Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn, today, although quite dead, whether it was suicide or murder, is much like a pyramid in our society. It's an imposing structure made with huge heavy blocks that no one can quite figure out how they got there but there they are. Sarah Churchwell's The Many Lives Of Marilyn Monroe never loses sight of the author's introductory theme. Previous biographies of Marilyn Monroe promised to reveal something as yet unknown. read more...
*Abigail Koons reviews The Black Englishman by Carolyn Slaughter: Carolyn Slaughter's ninth novel, The Black Englishman, tells the story of Isabel Herbert, a woman taken to India by her British military husband in 1920. Based loosely on Ms. Slaughter's grandmother's life, The Black Englishman is the story of a young woman searching for her identity in a foreign culture. Isabel fled the suffering brought on by The First World War by marrying Neville Webb, a career military man born and stationed in India. In deliberate, exquisite prose, Slaughter tracks the passionate, violent awakening of a young woman on the frontier of freedom, both of a nation and of herself. read more...
*Jaclyn Thomas reviews Trance by Christopher Sorrentino:
Trance, Christopher Sorrentino's second novel, is a masterful work of balance and insight. It follows the wanderings of the Symbionese Liberation Army and their heiress captive, Alice Girton, whose plight echoes that of Patty Hearst. Wonderfully, the plot – full of big guns, random shootings, the media's insatiable appetite and the passionate rhetoric of revolution – does not overshadow the core of the novel. read more...
*Laurence Dumortier reviews Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, edited by Daphne Gottlieb: In her introduction to Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, editor Daphne Gottlieb writes, “After the call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset e-mails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this question would not be asked of the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance.” Why this might not be so, Gottlieb explains herself: “But mothers, the ill, and dancers, do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform.”read more...
*Laurence Dumortier reviews Ophelia's Fan by Christine Balint : Ophelia's Fan, a novel by Christine Balint, traces the life of the Irish Shakesperean actress Harriet Smithson, who inspired Hector Berlioz to write his Symphonie Fantastique. The novel is conceived as memories set down by Smithson when she is in her forties, so that Louis, her son with Berlioz, can truly understand his mother as she was before the weakening of her body and spirit. (It is also intercut with passages narrated by the characters Smithson played – Anne Boleyn, Desdemona, Juliette, Ophelia, and others – retelling their famous stories from a uniquely personal perspective.) read more...
*Joanna Pearson reviews Down Spooky by Shanna Compton: Poet Shanna Compton is the queen of quirk— and yet within her bright slashes of language lies real pathos, real insight. David Lehman has said of Compton's debut collection, Down Spooky, that it “radiates an exuberant joy in the life of words.” I can think of no better description myself. Compton recaptures the vibrancy of sound and wordplay that is too often forgotten by modern poets—a delight in sound and lyric playfulness that is rarely seen now outside the realm of hip-hop and spoken word.read more...
*Steve Himmer reviews Eve Green by Susan Fletcher: Susan Fletcher's Whitbread-winning debut Eve Green is a story assembled from secrets, those life has kept from the narrator and those she in turn keeps from the reader. The eponymous Eve is seven when she suddenly loses her mother and is whisked away to her grandparents in rural Wales, to live in the house where her mother grew up.
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*John A. Mangarella reviews THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES Volume Three, edited by Leslie S. Klinger: Sherlock Holmes has been sleuthing the literary landscape nearly 150 years. The stories that were originally carried in The Strand Magazine made the jump to the silver screen with Basil Rathbone and then to the popular television series. The Canon has never been out of print, enchanting and enthralling successive generations with tales of mystery and deduction. If I ever attempted to review Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales, I'd have the Baker Street Irregulars chasing me much like the villagers chasing Frankenstein. And rightfully so.
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*Joanna Pearson reviews Elements of Style (Illustrated) by William Strunk and E.B. White, Illustrated by Maira Kalman: In ninth-grade English, I was introduced to The Elements of Styleby William Strunk and E.B. White. Needless to say, this was a while ago, and I've both read and written a few things since then. Nonetheless, just weeks ago I managed to turn in a poem to my writing workshop containing the line, “He lifts the ringing culprit in his fingers.” My instructor looked at me askance before asking why I hadn't simply written, “He answers his cell phone.” Oh….Yeah. Clearly for some of us, the reissue of Elements, newly illustrated by Maira Kalman, has come not a moment too soon. read more...
*Patricia R. Payette reviews The Secret Histories: Hidden Truths that Challenged the Past and Changed the World by John S. Friedman: The release of John Friedman's book The Secret Histories: Hidden Truths that Challenged the Past and Changed the World is timely. Amid fresh revelations that top officials in the Bush administration are mired in cover-ups and half-truths that led the country into the Iraq War, Friedman's collection of “secret” documents that changed history packs a powerful political punch.
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*Abigail Koons reviews The Sari Shop by Rupa Bajwa: Rupa Bajwa's debut novel, The Sari Shop, meticulously examines Indian society through the tight lens of the Sevak Sari Shop in Amritsar, India. When Ramchand, a shop assistant, begins to open his eyes to different levels of Indian society interacting within the sari shop, he is stunned to discover humanity's true nature. read more...
*Michael Hartford reviews Carrying the Torch by Brock Clarke: Each of the nine stories in Brock Clarke's Carrying the Torch ends with a turn – not the O. Henry twist or the Joycean epiphany, but something subtler. Faced with the loss of love or home or family, the characters in Carrying the Torch realize that life demands compromise and loss in return for small graces. These are quiet and hopeful stories that suggest that we not hope for too much.read more...
*Laurence Dumortier reviews Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox: Borrowed Finery is Paula Fox's memoir, now re-issued in paperback by Picador, of her childhood and adolescence at the hands of her sophisticated and savagely self-centered parents. The book is filled as much by their presence as by their absence, which weighs heavily and with great perplexity.read more...
*David Barringer reviews Nosferatu by Jim Shepard: Nosferatu, the novel by Jim Shepard, has come back to life after seven years. The University of Nebraska Press includes an introduction by Ron Hansen in this 2005 paperback release. The first incarnation of this novel was published, in hardcover, by Knopf in March 1998. Also in 1998, Faber & Faber published a British paperback under the title, Nosferatu In Love, an edition with a whimsical cover (a jaunty Nosferatu waving a long-fingered claw; if you check it out at Powells.com, I swear you can hear Nosferatu calling, “Hey HEY hey!”).read more...
*Elizabeth Koch reviews Madly by William Benton: “I met Irina in late August,” reads the first sentence of William Benton's debut novel, Madly. It's a tiny sentence; simple, declarative, and forthright; innocent of manipulation, lacking in gloss or wit. You may think you know the sort of book you're getting with such an honest title, such a matter-of-fact first sentence, but don't bet on it. Madly is not a love story. It does not tempt you to tears, or warm your heart, or serve as an amusing distraction before bed. Truthfully, it doesn't even read like a novel. read more...
*Summer Lopez reviews Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems by John Kinsella:
This collection [Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems ] of Australian poet John Kinsella's crisp and vivid works is a delight. Dedicate some time to sitting down with these poems and appreciating the subtle rhythms, the vibrant images, and the layers of meaning to be found in each. Kinsella's poems do seem to be lit with a kind of peripheral light, conjuring as they do visions of gray skies and pastoral settings.read more...
*Steven Hansen reviews Big Lonesome by Jim Ruland:
Not one to settle for common time frames or settings to tie his stories together, the pieces in Jim Ruland's debut collection Big Lonesome are so different from one another in time and space (and style, for that matter) that one marvels at the amount of research he must have done -- as well as the facile imagination needed -- to bring them all so entertainingly to life.read more...
*Joanna Pearson reviews Women of America (poems) by Charlie Smith: Charlie Smith is the sort of poet you wish were a blogger—and I mean this as a serious compliment. Maybe this seems like paltry praise for someone who has already authored six novels and five previous books of poetry, won National Endowment from the Arts grants and Guggenheim fellowships, and whose work regularly appears in major literary magazines, but, hey, a good blog is hard to find. And in a world crammed with people eager to dissect every detail of their days publicly, we could actually use someone like Smith who knows how to draw the universal out of the personal, a trick that seems to elude many. read more...
*John A. Mangarella reviews I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe:
No one delivers a slice of fictional America better than Tom Wolfe. I Am Charlotte Simmons captures college life with the same powerful scope that The Bonfire Of The Vanities magnified the barracuda of 1980's greed. Where Bonfire exposed naked power, those who had reached the top of the mountain and those still at its base being exploited by a ruthless media that had entrenched itself between them, Charlotte Simmons describes a more subdued force that masquerades as academia while beating with a chilly, unforgiving corporate heart.read more...
*Joanna Pearson reviews Pyx (poems) by Corinne Lee: When Pattiann Rogers picked Corinne Lee's book Pyx to be published as a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, she cited its “original and engaging music.” Indeed, the first book of this Iowa Writing Workshop alumna, is vibrantly different. As Rogers also points out in her introduction, Lee is a master of mixing references and lexicon: the mythical and maternal, and the literary and lowbrow are brought together in lovely, quirky fusion.read more...
*David Barringer reviews Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn:
A gifted, empathetic writer with a thing for epiphany over resolution, Reinhorn in her debut story collection, Big Cats rolls as steadily with young characters on the edge as she does with older ones doing their damnedest not to return to the edge. Each story slips into you from the get-go. Drama depends on folks with hurt, history and heartache. It's not about the earthquake at the bank but the employee's emotional paralysis; not about beasts roaming free at the zoo but the prickly egos of two girls chafing to mature in the absence of role models...read more...
*Joanna Pearson reviews The Disinherited by Han Ong: The Disinherited is one long, unflinching trudge through the Philippines— a don't-look-away account of everything from the slums of Manila to the rich foreign tourists' sex clubs to the steely polish of the Manila elite. Roger Caracera, the 44-year-old Americanized son of Filipino sugar baron Jesus Caracera, returns home for his father's funeral. There, surrounded by his image-obsessed, high-society family, Roger views the world he has left with a mixture of detachment, scorn, and pity. In a move that is as unexpected as it is stubbornly perverse, Roger's late father leaves him the bulk of his fortune and interests, entwining Roger directly into the corrupt family from whom he is so eager to disengage and a country he thought he'd left behind. read more...
*Joanna Pearson reviews The Man From Beyond by Gabriel Brownstein: Gabriel Brownstein's debut novel, The Man From Beyond, reasserts the primacy of the cleanly written, captivating tale. Amidst so many writers who seem lost in their own words, sputtering in rococo self-indulgence, Brownstein stands out as an articulate storyteller—one who knows how to transport listeners to a specific time and place and then let the mystery of his narrative unfold; a storyteller who can concoct a story that leaves an audience prickling with anticipation.
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