Book Reviews Archive
Review: IN MY SKIN by Brittney Griner
In My Skin Brittney Griner with Sue Hovey itbooks, 2014 216 pages Buy: book | ebook No matter how un-invested an athlete is in the production of their own book—no matter how transparently the ghostwriter has sat down with their subject for as few hours as possible, then hurriedly
Interactivity and the Game-ification of Books
Author: Matthew Burnside | Categories: Authors, Fiction, Publishing, Reading, Series, Writing No comments
As an undergrad studying creative writing one of the first things I remember learning was the sin of gimmickry. Readers, I was taught, would see through your cleverness—it would be vile to them and they would hate you. But as a kid and teenager my favorite books employed some
REVIEW: Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe Lori Jakiela August 4, 2015 Atticus Books 290 pages Preorder Halfway through her new memoir, Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, Lori Jakiela comes across a mall kiosk selling Russian nesting dolls. “The doll in the woman’s hand looks
Review: GET IN TROUBLE by Kelly Link
Get in Trouble Kelly Link Random House, Feb 2015 352 pages Buy: book | eBook For a long time, with all due respect to the memoirists, I’ve believed that fiction holds a particular truth in literature. Maybe by removing the self from the work, and unburdening the story of actual
Five Speculative Tales Still Relevant Today (And What They Can Teach Us)
1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Seven-Word Summary: Women enslaved by tyrannical dicks with dicks. Excerpt: “Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death.
Well-Traveled Verse: The Book of Poems You’ll Find Everywhere in India
Indian bookstores come in wide varieties: street-sellers pitch copies of everything from tabloids to Freud, more upscale boutiques feature plastic-wrapped paperbacks in scholarly fields, and stuffed-to-the-brim cubicles at train depots deliver Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels beside worn editions of the Gita. But, without a doubt, I always came across copies
Review: THROWN by Kerry Howley
Thrown Kerry Howley Sarabande Books, 2014 282 pages Buy: book | ebook Being intimate with some sports is far from a guarantee that one is even acquainted with all of them. Personally I’ve never wanted to watch a single mixed-martial arts fight until reading Kerry Howley’s Thrown, a page-turner
Hilarious Discomfort: On Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout”
The Sellout — Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus & Giroux March 2015 304 pages Buy now I sat down to read Paul Beatty’s new satirical novel The Sellout knowing I was going to write about it. In fact, I had committed to writing about it. I had pitched it; it was my idea. This
This Spring’s Must-Reads
Spring is in the air, and good books are in our hearts! Read on for our picks for this spring’s best literary offerings. Night At The Fiestas Kirstin Valdez Quade Norton, March 23 $26 Buy: book ∣ebook Kirstin Valdez Quade is one of the National Book Foundation’s 5-Under-35
The Poetry of Subtle Movement
In recent months, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has released two poetry collections that encapsulate much of what I love about poetry: James Lasdun’s Bluestone: New and Selected Poems and Devin Johnston’s Far-Fetched. Lasdun and Johnston are quite different in style and subject matter, but they are both masters of