Book Reviews Archive

Review: THROWN by Kerry Howley

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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”

Author: | Categories: Fiction, Reading No comments
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

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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

Author: | Categories: Poetry, Reading No comments
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

THE NEUTRAL CORNER: Michael Hofmann’s “Where Have You Been?” And Gottfried Benn’s “Impromptus”

The neutral corner is one of the two corners of the ring not used by boxers between rounds. It is also the corner a boxer must retreat to after he has floored his opponent. The Neutral Corner was also a bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, that I frequented

Review: THE PAPER MAN by Gallagher Lawson

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The Paper Man Gallagher Lawson Published: May 12, 2015 Unnamed Press 261 pages Buy: book   A man with a papier mâché body and hair made of yarn attempts to break out of his protected, isolated, and stagnant life and escape to an unnamed city. On the bus, a

Review: GUTSHOT by Amelia Gray

Gutshot Amelia Gray FSG Originals Published: 4/14/15 224 pages $14.00 If Amelia Gray’s collection, Gutshot, was choreography, it would be comprised of violent, animalistic phrases: bodies smashing into each other and hands clawing into skin. But on the page, these assembled short stories use a vocabulary of the body

When We Are Given a Feast of Flesh

How do I remember spaces? Bedrooms, beaches, backseats, bazaars. The time between dreams. Night. The no-man’s land of a twelve-hour flight. I remember the world as words. I spent my last few weeks in Delhi hunting for books. For relatives, for friends, but, finally, for my own sake: to

Review: Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism

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Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism Walter LaFeber W.W. Norton, 1999 191 Pages Buy: book | ebook It doesn’t take very long for a revolution to seem quaint. In 1999, the year that Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism was published by Cornell Professor Emeritus of history

Blood Memory

“There is only one of you in all time; this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”—Martha Graham Dance was my first foray into art, and I studied it for sixteen years with the kind