NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

Fort Gorgeous, Angela Vogel’s first full-length collection, populates an original fairytale landscape—one grounded thematically in 19th and 20th century American literature and painting—with a village of anachronistic, pop-cultural misfits who define the contours of the contemporary American identity. Vogel’s poems, so playful and satisfying when read aloud, imply that these American archetypes, figures once representing a type of individualism, have now been commodified, reduced to emblems in our mass-produced, mashed-up and hyper-mediated versions of reality. The reader imagines, while reading the thirty-seven ultra-imaginative poems in this collection, that the characters in Fort Gorgeous have themselves mindlessly purchased the dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, neatly packaged and wrapped. Continue reading “Fort Gorgeous”

The prose pieces in Megan Volpert’s new collection of poetry, Sonics in Warholia, read more like essays, but defining or discussing the boundaries of different genres serves no purpose and would completely miss the mark of this stunning collection. Comprised of eight pieces, the book offers extended meditations, both far-reaching and deeply personal, surrounding the biography of (and addressed to the ghost of) Andy Warhol. Throughout the book, Volpert masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate images, events, and ideas to brilliantly create complete and coherent essays that can appeal to both those who are familiar and those who are unfamiliar with Warhol’s life and work. Volpert’s vision is clever, touching, and singular. Continue reading “Sonics in Warholia”

As explained in Version 3.0, the plays in this new anthology of Asian American drama are rarely produced outside of New York City and California. Yet they ought to be, as they encompass many cultures’ assimilation and conflicts with white culture. The anthology spans the generations from the Japanese internment years up to the multi-racial 2000s. The first wave of plays has common themes of “Asian American history and immigration, generational and familial conflict, cultural identity and nationalism.” The second wave further includes Chinese and Filipino playwrights, and the third those of Indian, Korean and Vietnamese descent. This last group, with l4% identifying themselves as “multiracial” in the 2000 census, says, “No single writer can represent an entire culture; only a community of writers can do that.” Continue reading “Version 3.0”

Any collection of national poetry shows its audience the formed, collective identity of its poets and their artistic milieu. The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry is no exception. In truth, the anthology, brilliantly compiled by editors Paul Doru Mugur, Adam J. Sorkin, and Claudia Serea, sketches a post-Iron Curtain world where Romanian national identity is as fractured as its economy and societal mores are as complex as the centuries of religious strata that seem to overlay every life – or, in the case of the poems, every text. To quote Doru Mugur in his introduction, these texts are what linguist Umberto Eco calls “the authentic fake” and, in the context of The Vanishing Point That Whistles, the texts, the lives, and the poems are the truths, lies, and everything grey in between. The theme of “authentic fake” through a fractured national identity is most clearly seen through the poems and prose that acknowledge the deep and permeating role of religion in Romania’s national identity, rawly juxtaposed against everyday being and everyday living in Romania. Continue reading “The Vanishing Point that Whistles”

Annam Manthiram’s first novel, After the Tsunami, a finalist in the 2010 Stephen F. Austin State University Press Fiction Contest, is a powerful story of endurance but also a disturbing picture of an orphanage for boys in India. The inspirations for this novel were first, the experiences of the author’s two elder sisters in a boarding school and secondly, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In this novel, the boys had either lost their parents in the tsunami or were abandoned by living parents. Since the orphanage’s “Mothers” were so arbitrarily brutal, the boys had to bond to survive, but their shifting alliances also had consequences. Siddhartha, the narrator, a successful teacher in the U.S. with a loving family, is haunted by what happened to his friends and what he did himself to add to the brutality in the “House.” Continue reading “After the Tsunami”

The Hermit shows us Laura Solomon’s self-reflexive speaker, a poet who has lived much of her life sending more love letters to the world than she has received from it. In poem after poem of her third book, the poet-speaker illustrates the loneliness, anxiety, and doubt she has endured while living through words, whose meanings have weathered time. The problem she has had, we imagine, is with written language itself—“in the dream you are becoming / don’t become just words / one more person for whom love prefers / words to other people” (“Dream Ear III”). It seems the words she inks from memory cannot stay fixed. Even though remembered experience does not yellow like paper, it undergoes significant alterations—people change into shadows of their former selves, cities decay and get restored and decay again, and places once important to us drift into our peripheries. We imagine that another problem she has must be with the slipperiness of written language, its phenomenological deficiencies. Particular experience falls through the gaps left between the sentences she writes. As with infatuation, the good feeling that surges through us while in the flow of writing is short-lived. We each know something about how this goes, but most of us shrug when we ask ourselves how a poet might express such frustration. Solomon does so by writing poems that get at how her romantic relationship with the world—its people, places, things and valences—has matured and, as a result, taken up a more realistic position regarding written language and its possibilities. Continue reading “The Hermit”

Daniel Bullen delivers an intimate account of five artist-couples whose relationships stepped outside of the status quo of the times in which they lived. He admits that his interest in the subject is personal. In writing this book he was “looking for the language to reconcile marriage and desire.” Any long-lasting intimate relationship of significance is bound to be a tricky endeavor—prone to be often full of mishaps, some a matter of chance, others deliberately pursued. Bullen’s book is more concerned with the latter; the individuals in these relationships each pursue multiple lovers, leading to hopelessly complicated love lives. Continue reading “The Love Lives of the Artists”

Brian Evenson’s latest collection toes the line between genre and so-called literary fiction and between a recognizable world and new dimensions. Those familiar with his previous work won’t be surprised, as Evenson frequently does this; however, this certainly isn’t a run-of-the-mill collection. Continue reading “Windeye”

The Story of Buddha: A Graphic Biography plots the Buddha’s journey from crown prince of the ??kya kingdom to Enlightenment as a reformed ascetic, as told and illustrated by Hisashi Ota. It’s a story not often heard outside the studies of practicing Buddhists or lectures on World Religion, but it is key for even a basic understanding of Buddhism, the religion based on Buddha Sakyamuni’s teachings. Continue reading “The Story of Buddha”

I’ve been dipping into Joe Wilkins’ Killing the Murnion Dogs all month like a box of Russell Stover’s candy. Unlike the box of chocolates, I haven’t picked a bad piece. Every poem is a little gem, like your favorite chocolate, not sweet but revelatory and exciting as it delivers moments of loss and gain. Continue reading “Killing the Murnion Dogs”

Readers who love word play, such as puns, and prefer a nonlinear structure for the surprises it brings will find prize-winning Scottish novelist Ali Smith’s There But For The amusing and insightful. Continue reading “There But for The”

The old adage, good things come in small packages, rolls off the tongue easily during times when economy is in fashion: smaller cars, tighter budgets, and fuel-efficient homes. Lately, the scarcity I feel regards time. So when a batch of uncorrected proofs of lyrical shorts arrived in the mail, I thrilled at the brevity of their roughly 7 x 5 inch shape, the ample white space on the pages, and the thin way they slid into my purse, at the ready for checkout lines, dentist chairs, and half-hour lunch breaks. This month, I’ve come to understand that good writing comes in small packages, and that a mere few lines can pack a potent narrative punch. Continue reading “Darling Endangered”

As its name might suggest, Karen Carcia’s On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing explores the periphery of awareness: objects unseen, things unsaid, and events forgotten. Like a crooked tree, the chapbook depends upon what isn’t there as much as what is, achieving its own wholeness and balance. Continue reading “On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing”

This is a trippy little book. A biographical note in the back describes Macé’s writings as “unclassifiable texts that cross the lines between poem, essay, dream, biography, literary criticism, anthropology, and history.” This is as good a list of summary descriptors for this book that’s to be found; Macé covers all these areas. It’s a unique object of curiosity. Continue reading “The Last of the Egyptians”

Stephen Beachy’s novel Boneyard is different, even original. Appealing perhaps to a younger readership, the book shows a young man’s revolt against the Amish community he came from, as well as against the outside world. It parts ways with the usual sentimentalized picture of Amish society (like in Beverly Lewis’ novels). It is also different in including the author and his editor battling with each other as part of the story—and that battle in interesting footnotes! Lyrical in parts, Boneyard depicts a young man’s dark fantasies that evolve and transform right up to the end. Clearly Beachy is questioning how much of reality we can know in fiction. Continue reading “Boneyard”

There is still so much surprise to be had in “old” age. In the title poem of The Joy of the Nearly Old, Rosalind Brackenbury writes of a dying poet, “poetry / changes nothing in the world, / only poetry. But poetry, he told me, / is everything.” In Brackenbury’s world, the poem is the oasis. Viewing life as an extended poem, one unendingly upbeat though not without its share of obstacles, is one way the poet’s speaker continues to find surprise in “nearly old” age. Death is inevitably sprinkled throughout the pages of a book about aging, waving to us from over the brink, but sadness remains largely buried under the surface of these poems, particularly those about death. Even death is not so daunting; it is always met with optimism, as after all it has only “terrier jaws.” The Joy of the Nearly Old is minimal in structure—short lines compose short poems; syntax and diction are simple and airy—but it is only deceptively minimal in idea. To say it plainly, the poet makes writing poignant poems—the kind that sting like bees and are gone before you know what has happened—look easy. In these poems, small things physically fill big spaces, and the same is figuratively true of Brackenbury’s writing prowess. Continue reading “The Joy of the Nearly Old”

The idea of completely understanding the processes of any revolutionary change is daunting—to say nothing of making sense of its cultural and historical contexts. In the historic waves of North American feminist theory and practices, the respective paradigms of feminism shift, evolve, and ultimately normalize along lines of particular intellectual circles and politically historic movements. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the first convention for women’s rights and suffrage in 1848, for example, show a completely different, and seemingly unparalleled, cultural milieu than a feminist theorist like twenty-first century philosopher Judith Butler. Both women, however, illustrate a “revolutionary context” for understanding a broader feminist identity, however constructed—both show the powerful effects of change within particular societal circumstances. In Writing the Revolution: The Feminist History Project’s Collected Columns of Michele Landsberg, Canadian writer, social activist, and ardent feminist Michele Landsberg reminds us that beyond any of the historical feminist revolutions are the people of the revolutions—women and their narratives. From Landsberg’s columns, we get the sense that she finds feminism on the ground, in everyday life, to be the centering force that keeps the falcon of feminist theory from circling out in a wider and wider gyre of culture. Continue reading “Writing the Revolution”

In Panic Attack, USA, the debut collection of poetry by Nate Slawson, the poems rush full speed with wounded but open hearts into the wild and unpredictable future. “I call my heart Megaphone,” a speaker claims in the poem “July 4,” “because I sometimes feel / epic when I feel / with my complete circulatory / system.” Each poem in the collection seems to have speakers with these megaphone hearts, speakers who feel epic when feeling, who have the volume cranked to eleven 24/7. Continue reading “Panic Attack, USA”

The first section of Spring, by British writer David Szalay, has the feel of listening to a clueless college pal heading for another romantic train wreck. An inscrutable, perhaps capricious woman becomes the blank screen on which he paints his own meanings. James, now in his mid-thirties, is no longer a hipster entrepreneur, having already gained and lost a fortune in the volatile economics of the dot-com world. He is bright and wounded and seems to choose cluelessness in a willful way. He ruminates about his downsized life expectations: Continue reading “Spring”

The title to Garrett Socol’s fiction book, Gathered Here Together, at first may be reminiscent of the phrase shared at the beginning of a wedding ceremony, but as soon as you dive into the first few stories, it is clear that the people are gathered for funerals. In fact, the short story from which the book gets its title is a story about a woman flying home for the funeral of her best friend. The tie that links the collection together is the theme of death; even when you think it is going to be a great love story, death creeps up, just as death creeps up on us in real life. The book explores the different ways that death, the fear of death, or the consequences of death can turn life in new directions. Continue reading “Gathered Here Together”

In a series of before-and-after poems, Amal al-Jubouri describes the changes in day-to-day action and mood in Baghdad and greater Iraq after the invasion by American forces and the fall of the Ba’ath Party in 2003. Continue reading “Hagar Before the Occupation Hagar After the Occupation”

In this collection of twenty-five short stories, Brian Doyle takes his readers on a roller-coaster ride through social issues, politics, war, religion, mortality, and morality and shares his beliefs as an Irish, Catholic, devoted husband and father as openly here as he does in his nonfiction. Readers familiar with Doyle’s work will recognize the playful prose and rhythmic sentences, which the writer has tailored in tone and content to match each character’s persona, while a charming, unnamable oddness chuckles over the entire collection. Doyle doesn’t tell his readers what or how to think; rather, he simply asks us to follow him like the Pied Piper and watch as he drills down to the marrow of something, where he almost invariably finds a shred of hope. Continue reading “Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories”

In her first book, Piano Rats, Franki Elliot gives the world a glimpse inside her life as she recounts scenes of her past and the other characters inside them. With a writing style that’s blunt, honest, and beautiful, she wins readers over as someone who’s easy to relate to—someone else who’s felt messed up or like they have messed up, or someone who’s been in love or fallen out of it. Continue reading “Piano Rats”

Within this brief but multitudinous chapbook, Ann Cefola contemplates ordinary existence alongside the sacred. In 28 poems of varying form—some splaying across the page, others in neat, organized stanzas—St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped investigates the constant buzz and movement of modern existence through these lyrical narratives. The world of schoolboys, make-up counters, hotels that may appear familiar is elevated into something of greater importance. Continue reading “St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped”

In the late eighteenth- through mid-nineteenth centuries, the British Empire exiled close to 162,000 men, women, and children under the Transportation Act to serve their prison sentences in Australia—simultaneously ridding Britain of an overcrowded prison population and providing the Empire with expendable colonists. Continue reading “The Tin Ticket”

Vinnie Wilhelm’s “Fautleroy’s Ghost,” included in his short story collection In the Absence of Predators, first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review. I remember reading it and feeling great affection for a writer who could encompass an empathetic account of the doomed revolutionary faith of both Leon Trotsky and Patrice Lumumba within a Hollywood spoof. Ben Stuckey leaves his leaky living room in Seattle to pitch his script for a bio-pic of Trotsky: Continue reading “In the Absence of Predators”

Prior to audio and video, theatre history is a frustratingly silent one. Reviews, illustrations, journal entries, photographs, designs, and prompt books are helpful—and rare. Continue reading “Starring Madame Modjeska”

It is impossible to think of forking paths without recalling Borges’s garden of innumerable possibilities. And so in James Grinwis’s second book of poems, Exhibit of Forking Paths, selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the National Poetry Series, it makes sense that we find a poetry of possibilities and alternatives, a bit of play, an interest in “what the sounds mean before the definitions of sounds,” and a space where things can simultaneously be and not be. The title poem, which opens the book, presents different lives captured on numbered tablets, with the speaker coyly stating, “In the case of tablet 31, we will not speak.” Grinwis delivers a lot in this collection, but he reminds us we cannot have it all. Continue reading “Exhibit of Forking Paths”

The title of Bruce Jay Friedman’s new “literary” memoir, Lucky Bruce, is an understatement. All the old adages about luck come to mind, you make your own luck, some are luckier than others, etc., but when you read Friedman’s life story you can’t help but agree: Bruce is one lucky guy. Continue reading “Lucky Bruce”

The principal aim of The City, Our City, the latest poetry collection by Wayne Miller, is to construct a difficult, philosophical poetics that most audiences will have trouble wrestling into meaning. I have no problem with being pleasantly mystified or even confused (Lynn Emanuel’s latest work baffles me even as I gasp with wonder), but this book straddles a fine line between unsettling readers and completely turning them off. Since Miller’s previous volumes, especially The Book of Props, have won praise from many circles (including The New Yorker), perhaps he need not worry about losing readers; his audience may well be confined to those in the academy. And after all, The City, Our City does still showcase the poet’s remarkable skill, though it should be noted that his most successful poems establish a scene and context in which his talent begins to shine. In “Winter Pastoral,” a quiet love poem, he writes: Continue reading “The City, Our City”

Disclosure is by far one of the most interesting books I have ever read. It should perhaps be called “Full Disclosure,” as Lomax presents us with so many fragments from various areas of her life. Some pieces disclosed to us are FAFSA forms, an acceptance letter into the Peace Corps, pay stubs from several different jobs (including Taco Bell), student reviews of her teaching skills, bank statements, and medical forms. Lomax has no qualms about baring all of the personal, private information in these documents. Continue reading “Disclosure”

It’s clear within the first few paragraphs that Alan Kaufman has no intention of holding anything back in Drunken Angel. The book brings the reader into his life as a young writer, a soldier in Israel, a husband, an addict, and finally a father, with many more twists and turns throughout. There were moments, while reading, that I disliked things he did and had I met him then, I probably wouldn’t have liked him very much. However, Kaufman’s willingness to open up so completely to his reader, to put himself in such a vulnerable position, won my respect. Continue reading “Drunken Angel”

Erri de Luca’s The Day Before Happiness, a bildungsroman set in Naples after WWII, shows both memories of the war and the city at that time, focusing on characters in an apartment complex. It also offers poetic insights along with humor. The lyrical style ultimately doesn’t distinguish the two main characters, even though one is a boy and one his caretaker/mentor, but the humor does distinguish another character in his nouveau riche ignorance. Continue reading “The Day Before Happiness”

Brooklyn Arts Press has entered the business of publishing chapbooks with a collection about endings. Joe Fletcher, whose previous publications include the chapbook Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow Press), evokes in Already It Is Dusk a world drunk on its own decay, whose fields are “abandoned by sowers” and whose “soldiers stare blankly at the smoldering embassy.” While not as bleak as, say, Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, this world is peopled with monsters such as “Ben Nez the Winged,” who threatens to suck the breath from that poem’s narrator, so that he “drag[s his] boots to smear [his] tracks.” More often than not, the monster is within, such as in “Hunting” when the hunter must “Pry the chickens’ chests open / with my beak” after they “walk right up into my outstretched arms.” Continue reading “Already It Is Dusk”

In Hypotheticals, the scientific method breaks down into a scattering of hypothetical circumstances. Leigh Kotsilidis’s debut poetry collection delves into the reimagining of knowledge and personhood, questioning, on an elemental scale, the configuration of the world. A variety of formal and free verse poems, Hypotheticals takes a hard yet lyrical look at the creatures and objects that inhabit our planet, inviting the reader in to experience these strange and surprising sensations. Continue reading “Hypotheticals”

The Cisco Kid in the Bronx is a Caribbean emigrant bildungsroman that at moments may remind the reader of the classic collection Drown by Junot Diaz. Ortiz’s collection certainly fulfills many of the conventions of what could be considered a Caribbean Diaspora literature. Continue reading “The Cisco Kid in the Bronx”

In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg gives a vivid description of life in California from the 1950s-1960s. Setterberg’s style of writing quickly pulls the reader into his world. I’ve never been to California, my parents were born in the years when his story begins and I seemingly have nothing in common with Setterberg’s experiences, but that doesn’t matter at all. The people in his “true-life novel” are so vivid that almost instantly you understand how their minds work and their relationships to each other. Continue reading “Lunch Bucket Paradise”

Admitting his aim is to provoke, and filled with acidic rectitude, Anis Shivani rants on in Against the Workshop about what demonstrably awful affects MFA programs have upon American writing. Under his analysis, the entire academic system of American letters appears corrupt: a viral sham in which all involved would feel ashamed if only they weren’t so mired within its murky workings. Shivani’s not exactly wrong—his points are, for the most part, well made, and there’s no doubting his sincerity. Yet despite the at-times attractive bluster Shivani coats his commentary in, he fails to finally offer up any central focus for complaint. This haphazard collection of book reviews and essay-length, bombastic taking-to-task of academic career fiction writers and poets is finally nothing but a roller-coaster jaunt through several publications of the last decade or so; Shivani’s arguments realize no greater whole to counter his provocative railings against the status quo. Continue reading “Against the Workshop”

selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee is a collection of unpublished blog entries that teeters between poetry and prose writing. Rarely do I come across writing that can pass as both styles, which is interesting. There are no capital letters in the entire book, which adds to the informal tone. Assuming the collection is autobiographical (as it stems from blog posts), Boyle is a 23-year-old bi-curious stoner who records her life. It is one of the most honest pieces I have ever read; she even lists every single person she has had sex with, never leaving out minor details such as whether or not they used condoms and if she had orgasms. After describing each of her 21 partners, Boyle enters a brief moment of self-reflection: “relieved I don’t have AIDS or children.” Continue reading “selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee”

A fan of Judith Kitchen’s Short Takes, In Short, and In Brief anthologies of flash nonfiction, I could not wait to get a hold of Half in Shade, which—it turns out—is not your standard memwah. Rather, it is a collection of prose poems disguised as essays, the only difference between the two being how they’re typeset on the page. Kitchen characterizes it as “a series of lyric pieces written variously to, from, or around old photographs found in family albums and scrapbooks.” Whatever you call them, each of the lyric tidbits develops before the reader as if with toners and fixers and gelatin-silver in a darkroom, the process yielding startling and wondrous results. Continue reading “Half in Shade”

As a kid growing up in a rural community in central Ohio during the 1960s, I heard the word “Communist” bandied about as if it were the lowest form of life to crawl across the American landscape. I thought for a time they had to be like the ogres in Grimm’s fairytales who kidnapped children and ate them. Surely they lurked behind every corner. They were to be feared and exterminated. Commies were bad. Continue reading “Red Plenty”

After more than fifty years of James Laughlin’s New Directions publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, to have yet another new collection is a splendid surprise. Although many of these translations already appear in Williams’s Collected Poems, when all are gathered together from these separate sources and placed in company with a few other renegade poems not found there, the continuing necessity of considering the influence of Williams’s biracial heritage upon his work is evident. To not recognize this aspect of Williams’s identity is to risk missing a key component of his poetry. This is a danger editor Jonathan Cohen notes with his assertion that “Pound failed to understand that Williams identified himself as American because of his Hispanic background.” The multi-layered cultural identity of Williams celebrates the rich, fertile brewing ground that the Americas remain. Continue reading “By Word of Mouth”

Josh Rolnick writes like a storyteller. He places his characters in the middle of complex situations, but doesn’t leave them stranded. Instead, he inhabits their psyches and builds compelling scenes for them to respond to trouble in the best way they know how, by lunging headlong into it. Meanwhile he creates scenes that rivet you to a sliver of time and the gloom of place, sweeping you up in the first sentences of his eight tales and setting you down at the end of each one with greater faith in the human race. Continue reading “Pulp and Paper”

Novels that focus on contemporary foibles are often flattened in time by the ephemeral. In Thrown into Nature, Bulgarian writer Milen Ruskov sidesteps the obsolescence problem by giving us a picaresque novel set in sixteenth century Spain. Guimarães da Silva, acolyte and student, narrates his adventures with his mentor, Dr. Monardes, a true figure out of history, the “discoverer” and promoter of tobacco as the cure for whatever ails you. Continue reading “Thrown into Nature”

“We are nothing but characters in a book” surmises the child narrator forever staring into the window of “Mrs. Q.’s Drugstore.” It is left to the reader to determine the exact relationship among the trio of peepers and if they ever work up the courage to see those “things that she must have at the counter.” But by the end of Death-In-A-Box readers will have a very good idea of Alta Ifland’s writing talent. Continue reading “Death-In-A-Box”

Will Boast’s Power Ballads, winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, can at times feel as layered and as over-produced as its moniker. For one, the book, thematically linking the lives of various musicians, unfolds as a short-story cycle, which by the nature of the form allows a freedom and an unevenness to the storytelling on par with, say, Van Halen post-David Lee Roth. Continue reading “Power Ballads”

The Blood Lie is labeled as a Young Adult/Jewish Studies book, but I think the main intention of the writer was to present it as Jewish Studies. The characters, plot, and narration did not seem aimed at appealing to the young adult reader, but at telling a story of Jewish history. A young girl, Daisy, gets lost in the woods and the Jewish people of the town are accused of kidnapping her for a blood sacrifice for Yom Kippur. These people are soon ostracized and forced to band together. Continue reading “The Blood Lie”

Murray Shugars’s collection of poems, Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, is clearly divided into three sections with distinct differences in approaches to the craft. The first section, which gives the book its title, is the strongest of the three, as Shugars creates a distinct world in this section. These poems are much more narrative than the other two sections and draw mostly on his childhood, though the speaker of the poems moves into adulthood in the poems about war. Continue reading “Songs My Mother Never Taught Me”

Russian writer Nikolai Gogol is famous for his serious satiric novel The Overcoat, but The Night Before Christmas, originally published in a 1926 short story collection, was Gogol’s first work at age 27—an early contribution to Russian literature. Recognized then for its fine writing and humor, now it can also be appreciated as a charming picture of Ukrainian folklore. Instead of Scrooge or the Grinch, the devil and a witch make mischief on a night full of mystical forces, the night before Christmas. Continue reading “The Night Before Christmas”

Ten stories make up Tiff Holland’s collection, Betty Superman. The stories themselves are short; altogether they fill only thirty-four pages, stapled into a lovely little edition from Rose Metal Press. But the size of Holland’s collection is deceiving. These stories cover the span of a life as only linked shorts can. They invite the reader to fill in the spaces between the wacky and outrageous scenarios our narrator and her mother, Betty, find themselves in. Continue reading “Betty Superman”