Book Reviews Archive
Review: ATLAS OBSCURA: AN EXPLORER’S GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S HIDDEN WONDERS Ed. by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders Ed. by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton Workman, Sept.2016 480 pp; $35 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Aaron Sommers If you’re like me, then you associate atlases with maps. Maybe it’s part of the larger, more
David Lida’s ONE LIFE is the Injection of Humanity for Your Post-Election Blues
Post-election, escapism is the only salve when no one can seem to look each other in the eye. David Lida’s newest novel, ONE LIFE, is exactly the dark-humored piece of literature everyone should be indulging in right now.
A Stone, a Leaf, a Southern Genius
From the moment he steps onscreen in director Michael Grandage’s Genius Thomas Wolfe (played by Jude Law) is an aberration. At 6’5, the writer was literally larger than life. He often worked hovering over a refrigerator-cum-writing desk.
Review: LUCINDA by John Beer
Remarkably, Lucinda seems both composition exercise and confession (“once again the text finds itself / helplessly stuck between two distinct / critical foci, pinioned”), as unclassifiable and as exciting as the more than 200-year-old book that inspired it.
Prophecies, Odds, Fate, and…Your Vote
In the ruins of Moria, at a fork in the mountain tunnels, Gandalf explains to Frodo how the burden of carrying the ring to Mordor was passed to him. The word he uses? “Encouraging.” Tough to swallow, but Frodo learns if it weren’t for him, there would be no
Review: BAD FAITH by Theodore Wheeler
By anchoring his collection around Aaron Kleinhardt, Wheeler creates subtle connections. The stories feel linked in an understated but solid way, creating a canvas with more depth than any one short story alone could give. Wheeler’s characters are people we know.
In Bookstores Near You: OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN by Anne Valente
Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, does not begin with the shattering moment when Caleb Raynor enters Lewis and Clark High School and opens fire—a moment that surely warrants the dimming of the lights, the rising of a curtain. But no, in Valente’s narrative, the
Review: PATRICIDE by D. Foy
The protagonist in D. Foy’s second novel is that angry young kid whose pain and shame he cannot express except in strange orthogonal ways, ways that will only deepen his pain and shame, not alleviate them. But Foy allows us inside that boy’s beleaguered brain box and we feel
On Jess Walter’s “Beautiful Ruins”
In that moment, with the strings swelling to crescendo in your mind as you read it, as Dee Moray the beautiful (but not too beautiful) American actress steps off the boat and onto the shore, Walter writes how Pasquale, the dreamer, fell in love “Not so much with the
In Bookstores Near You: The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race ed. by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward introduces The Fire This Time, an anthology of essays and poems of witness and dissent, by expressing her own commingled dismay and hope regarding race relations in America. This book, she says, gathers “the great thinkers and extraordinary voices” of her generation to consider racism, both subtle