Reviews
January 19, 2012
The Journey to Planet X: Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds 3
by Vanessa Blakeslee
How many have seriously pondered Wonder Woman’s lineage to Diana the Huntress, for example? Or exactly how the superpowers and shortcomings of mythological heroes are conferred on their comic book cousins?
January 19, 2012
Dark Pensées: Fraser Nixon’s The Man Who Killed 2
by Emily St. John Mandel
Fraser Nixon’s debut novel is a fast, sharp piece of work. Novels with plots and titles like this one are easily filed under crime fiction, but this is one of countless instances where artificial divisions of genre do readers a disservice.
January 17, 2012
Who Needs Plot? Teju Cole’s Open City 2
by John Knight
Cole has crafted a novel that needs no beginning, middle, or end because it so humbly imagines actual life.
January 17, 2012
Word Flu: Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet 5
by David Winters
Marcus has managed to craft a story so disturbing that it’s best told with absolute clarity.
January 13, 2012
Faith in Appearances: Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda 2
by David Rice
His vision spreads outward, encompassing ever more of the nuances and frequencies of an urbanized West that has maxed out on chatter and distraction. It has to expand like this in order to express the burden of shepherding a lone self through a world of mass-consciousness, ruled by media and money, where terror is the only form of awe that has not been stripped and sold for parts.
January 12, 2012
If You Could Hear A Book, This Is How It Would Look 3
by Buzz Poole
Chromatic documents a segment of today’s music scene by favoring exciting and important visual examples that contribute to a sensory overload that better represents the music than words or notes ever could on their own.
