Reviews
January 15, 2007
The Grim and the Dead — Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala 1
by Noah Deutsch
On the handsome cover jacket of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation it says ‘a novel’ but at just over 140 pages, Beasts is more of a novella. Whatever the classification, the book is Iweala’s debut effort. From the inner jacket, the reader is informed that Iweala, whose parents are Nigerian, was born [...]
January 15, 2007
Tasty Morsels: The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain 1
by Emre Peker
Anthony Bourdain is raw, silly, funny, delicate and unedited. And so is his latest book The Nasty Bits, a collection of three-to-five-page shorts – with a few longer exceptions. The collection does not come close to the revealing, unique and intriguing Kitchen Confidential (Emre’s review). It is still a good read that [...]
January 10, 2007
Mostly, the Voice: A Review of Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children 2
by Garth Risk Hallberg
What is the source of Edward P. Jones’ magic? If you had asked me a month ago, I might have mentioned: plot, social importance, sweep. These were the Tolstoyan qualities I admired so much in 2003’s The Known World, surely one of the finest first novels published by an American in the last half [...]
January 8, 2007
Loud Sparrows: Little Stories from Big China 0
by Ben Dooley
As Edgar Allen Poe wrote in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” a short story should be able to be read in a “single sitting.” The writers in Loud Sparrows have taken his call for brevity to heart. Topping out at three pages, each selection from this anthology of Chinese “short-shorts” (also known by [...]
January 4, 2007
The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: January 2007 1
by Corey Vilhauer
As a reader, I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a wide variety of literary pieces – from potboiler mysteries to critically acclaimed tomes. I just like to read, I guess, and I like to talk about reading. And because I (unfortunately) don’t have a lot of people in my life to talk about reading [...]
December 4, 2006
The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: December 2006 5
by Corey Vilhauer
Okay, everyone. Listen up – especially you men out there. There’s a common feeling among casual readers that certain authors are untouchable by the male mind – books that are filled with flowery descriptions and love and all that crap. Books by Woolf, or by either of the Brontes. Or Austen. [...]
