Reviews
May 27, 2011
Zoo York Revisited: T.J. English’s The Savage City 3
by Michael Bourne
In March 1986, my first winter in New York, I was mugged in a deserted parking lot a few blocks north of Madison Square Park while coming home from a party downtown. It’s a funny story, actually.
May 26, 2011
Under Water: Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists 0
by Emily St. John Mandel
The story that surrounds Johanna Skibsrud’s first novel is captivating. The Sentimentalists, published by Canada’s tiny Gaspereau Press in an initial print run of 800, was the surprise winner of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize. And yet hype, of course, is a double-edged sword.
May 19, 2011
Working the Wound: Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye 1
by Jessica Freeman-Slade
I read this book in batches, putting it out of my reach until I could bring myself to pick it up again. I ran scared from this book, not because I didn’t think it would be worth reading, but because when I read it, I unraveled.
May 18, 2011
Non Sequitur ad Absurdum: David Thorne’s The Internet is a Playground 4
by Michael Thomsen
If there is an enduring truth revealed by the internet, it is that the world only seems to make sense when you filter most of it out.
May 13, 2011
I Was A Teenage Grave Robber: Daniel Kraus’s Rotters 0
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
Lest you fail to detect the skeleton of historical fact that gives shape to Daniel Kraus’s unsettling, baroque, and surpassingly lurid new young adult novel, Rotters, I begin this review with a short history of the resurrection men, vulgarly referred to as grave robbers or body snatchers.
May 13, 2011
Unhappy Trails: Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution 3
by Sarah LaBrie
There are a lot of reasons to write a memoir and one of them is to give yourself the chance to live history again, this time with all the events that matter solidly under your control.
