Reviews
June 14, 2010
Eating Your Feelings: Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake 5
by Eryn Loeb
What I ate while absorbed in the pages of this book seemed to matter more than with most others, because Bender’s latest is really about the intimate experience of food.
June 8, 2010
Ah, The Children: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad 3
by Sonya Chung
Fans of Egan’s previous novels will be intrigued and excited, I think, to delve into her work in this new (for her) collage, time-shifty, polyphonic form.
June 3, 2010
Mirror Askew: Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam 2
by Amy Halloran
Amsterdam draws the reader into the tensions of his teetering world, and the world that teeters beyond.
May 26, 2010
Sweet Recipes, Bitter Moments: Cakewalk by Kate Moses 0
by Jessica Ferri
In Moses’ unwieldy, beautifully written memoir, baking represents a brief reprieve from the relentless tension between her parents.
May 4, 2010
The Third Hunger of Günter Grass 0
by Ranbir Sidhu
What makes Grass’s memoir such a compelling and unusual master class in the art of fiction is not that he tells the reader how to write, but he shows, through glimpses, how he himself did it, and specifically, how he wrote his own life into his novels.
April 30, 2010
Fighting Words: Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History 1
by Jonathan Clarke
To its critics, boxing is as persistent and as worrisome a social phenomenon as prostitution; and indeed, being a very direct way for poor young men to make use of their bodies, it is a kind of masculine cognate for the female sex trade. The more sympathetic view is that boxing is ugly but necessary.
