Book Reviews Archive
The End of Things
Popular opinion says that during the holiday season, people either fall in love or reflect on their past year of life. Sometimes they do both, but it’s hard to manage these conflicting actions at the same time. One is active, expressive, and outward moving. The other is passive, observational,
Review: SWING TIME by Zadie Smith
In a novel about history, about generations, reading Swing Time is like suddenly remembering a song you used to love.
3 DoubleCross Press Chapbooks: Style Meets Sonority
DoubleCross Press makes gorgeous letter press chapbooks. But these aren’t just pretty faces; it’s what’s on the inside—poetry, poetics and "prose-ish" pieces—that counts. This month, I review three of them.
“I was a house / I was a witch” : Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us.”
“I was a house. / I was a witch” declares the middle stanza of Muriel Leung’s “A House Fell Down on All of Us” from the newest issue of DRUNKEN BOAT. This poem, in my reading, functions to present intermingling transformations that perform whatever an opposite of distillation forecloses.
Communists and Cassoulet: Julia Child on Dried Herbs, Dull Knives and Joseph McCarthy
If Julia Child and Avis deVoto were here today, they’d be great Facebook friends. Julia and Avis bonded over food—buying it, cooking it and eating it. But since they were without technology, they wrote letters, which Joan Reardon collected into a book titled As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis
The Beauty of Self-deprecation in Andrew Miller’s IF ONLY THE NAMES WERE CHANGED
Fasten your seat belts. Andrew Miller’s alternative lit style is about to take you on a bumpy ride. His memoir in essays, IF ONLY THE NAMES WERE CHANGED, vacillates between hyper-masculine and tender in terrain that traverses parental concerns about raising a daughter, drug and alcohol abuse, and how
Review: WHERE WE LAND by Daryl Farmer
And though all the stories follow different lives and the situations they face, it is Farmer’s simultaneous childlike-wonder and knowing restraint that weave these stories together into one, strikingly cohesive collection.
Review: THE IRRESISTIBLE INTROVERT: HARNESS THE POWER OF QUIET CHARISMA IN A LOUD WORLD by Michael Chung
Throughout her book, Chung reiterates the differences between extroverts and introverts, but eschews any claims of advantageousness. One person exults in a bar with his riotous friends while another broods in a library without anyone interrupting her. They’ll use different taps to distill pleasure from our world, but at
In Bookstores Near You: Donika Kelly’s Bestiary: Poems
When Donika Kelly's debut collection of poetry, Bestiary, was released barely one month ago, it came as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a long-listed nominee for the 2016 National Book Award. From page one, it's obvious why.
We Are Hungry, Michele Morano, for More
You have probably come across Michele Morano’s essay collection, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, at nonfiction conferences with presenters hailing it as an exemplary form of nonfiction. One of its essays, “The Queimada,” has been published in many anthologies. This contemporary classic illustrates the heights of the