Thursday, May 26 2011
Mostly Sizzle, Very Little Steak in ‘Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened’
I pretty much hang onto anything that comes from this author’s pen. However, I truly do feel that Niedzviecki is at his sharpest when he’s focused on journalistic works about the nature of the individual immersed in today’s pop culture saturated world.
Friday, August 13 2010
In the Spirit of ‘What He’s Poised to Do’, An Open Letter to Ben Greenman
Dear Mr. Ben Greenman: I want to run out onto the balcony of my apartment and yell from there how snazzerific, how terrificadelic, how übertastic this book is to the people gathered below.
Monday, June 14 2010
‘The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff’ Continues to Show Just How Talented Joseph Epstein Is
Joseph Epstein, one of the most admired essayists in American literature, turns his focus to storytelling in his latest book.
Tuesday, May 11 2010
Here’s a Collection That Deserves Attention From Those Who Are Devoted to Short Fiction
When Marisa Silver’s short stories realize they are bursting the bounds of their form, they shut themselves down abruptly, not even permitting themselves the airy stretch of a novella.
Wednesday, March 17 2010
The Living Dead by Various Authors
Both volumes find their writers sizing up the basic appeal of the zombie story: the ability to remake the world in some new charnel-house image. Consistently, both find their writers quite capable of the task.
Monday, January 18 2010
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams
Marking the birth of post-apocalyptic science fiction with the 1826 publication of Mary Shelley's plague tale The Last Man, Adams proposes that the sub-genre's as old as science fiction itself.
Monday, November 16 2009
Boston Noir by Dennis Lehane, Ed.
This anthology is a lot like the city it aims to depict: occasionally impressive, at times insincere, and very proud of its quirks and foibles.
Thursday, April 30 2009
I Go To Some Hollow by Amina Cain
At her best, Cain does a remarkable job of precisely evoking the way her characters feel as they give themselves over to the experience of some small, mundane mystery.
Thursday, March 5 2009
Nam Le: To Write or Not to Write an Ethnic Story
The stories are not about arrivals per se, but rather about approximate ideas of authorial arrival, about notions that an imagination, an author from a specific cultural background has arrived in the imagination of its diverse other(s).
Monday, February 2 2009
Future Missionaries of America by Matthew Vollmer
Like a throng of aging punk rockers at a Sex Pistols reunion concert, the characters all seem to possess the same type of aggressively apathetic outlook on life.
