Reviews
February 23, 2010
Brooklyn Underdog: Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats 6
by Emily St. John Mandel
Shoeshine Cats is admirable in part for its tinge of the improbable, its impossible suavité and secret rooms. Kestin catches us up in a gritty enchantment.
February 12, 2010
Photography Comes of Age: Street Seen 0
by Buzz Poole
More than a collection of captivating photographs, Street Seen establishes the foundation for how viewers learned to consider photography and notions of reality.
February 9, 2010
Reckless and Dangerous: Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever 5
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 12
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 15
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.
