Reviews
February 9, 2010
Reckless and Dangerous: Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever 4
by Theodore Wheeler
Justin Taylor depicts a generation raised on video games and cable-news politics, a nation where alcohol abuse and sexual discord are the main rites of passage.
February 4, 2010
It’s All Right to Cry: Restoring Raymond Carver’s Voice 10
by Frank Kovarik
The conventional shorthand is that Gordon Lish’s versions are bracing and bleak, Carver’s verbose and sentimental. But, in a just world, Beginners would be published as a stand-alone volume to replace the shell that Lish made of it.
January 29, 2010
Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk 10
by Lydia Kiesling
For all that Orhan Pamuk the citizen has been embroiled in legal struggles with the Turkish state, he strikes me in one sense as an elemental patriot. To chronicle something obsessively is a form of love, and Pamuk documents the details of his Istanbul obsessively.
January 27, 2010
Mythbusting: An Inside Look at the Last Days of the Moveable Feast 3
by Andrew Saikali
Morley Callaghan’s That Summer In Paris, written in 1962, reveals Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s true nature, and offers an insider’s view of the events in Paris, in the summer of 1929.
January 18, 2010
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s ‘Scary Fairy Tales’ 1
by Amy Halloran
I am not so certain I read hope in these pages but there is redemption within them, something that keeps the fantastical and mystical events that do not often end happily from seeming ripe with despair.
January 14, 2010
The Marble Faun: Hawthorne Feeds on Shadows 1
by Kevin Frazier
Has there ever been another writer of dark, morbid, surrealistic fiction who is as warm and humane as Nathaniel Hawthorne?
