Reviews
March 17, 2009
Behaving Badly: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower 1
by C. Max Magee
I was first alerted to Wells Tower’s existence in 2004 when a reader emailed asking what I knew about him. The answer was “nothing,” but I did a little digging and found some impressive long-form journalism, primarily in Washington Post Magazine and a growing reputation as a short fiction writer centering mainly on his Pushcart [...]
March 6, 2009
Variables and Thresholds: A Consideration of The Way through Doors by Jesse Ball 0
by Lauren Karwoski-Magee
Lauren Karwoski-Magee teaches architecture at Drexel University, runs her own architecture and design firm The Drafted Line, and reads a lot. 1. Cover art and a book’s spine are important. The spine of this book does something that I refer to in class as “drawing the viewer in,” making a person look closer and become [...]
February 13, 2009
Surrealpolitik: A Review of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness and Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
I. A man is condemned to a small room in a castle in a land that is not his own. A thousand typewritten pages cover the desk before him. Each of the thousand pages recounts two hundred murders. The man will not be released until he has read every word of every cold-blooded killing, and [...]
February 4, 2009
Everywhere Is Nowhere: A Review of The Lazarus Project 6
by Buzz Poole
Infrequent Millions contributor Buzz Poole has written for numerous publications and is the author of Madonna of the Toast. He is also the proprietor of a blog by the same name. I recently bought Aleksandar Hemon’s latest book, The Lazarus Project, on a whim. Always a sucker for fiction with photographs I had not heard [...]
January 20, 2009
Après Moi, Le Deluge: A Review of Barton Gellman’s Angler and Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
For civil libertarians, the inauguration of President Barack Obama augurs not only a brighter future, but a chance to shed light on the recent past. It goes almost without saying that the Bush Administration has, with its declaration of permanent war and attendant claims of executive privilege, sought to move the balance of power in [...]
January 12, 2009
Middlemarch: The Fraught Lives of Women and Men 6
by Kevin Hartnett
It sells Middlemarch short to call it a novel of manners, although if viewed from just one angle it is. The novel describes the precisely ordered life of the eponymous village in feudal England, where every resident can be placed on a grid according to his annual income and the quality of his lineage. There [...]
