NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews

With their directness and precision, their attention to what Ezra Pound would call “luminous details,” Joseph Young’s microfictions might be mistaken for Imagist poems, but with their shift away from showing “things” as “things” toward “things” as something else, or, rather, toward portraying both the “thingness” of the thing and of some different “thing,” his miniatures suggest something altogether different. But where they fit is less important than what they do, how they make you feel. In Easter Rabbit’s miniatures, its sharp sentences focused on often mundane details, Young offers epics. Seemingly channeling William Blake, he offers further “auguries of innocence,” further testaments to worlds in granules, heavens in flowers, and – well, suffice to say, these are sentences to linger over. Continue reading “Easter Rabbit”

Christine Hume’s language, “alive and lying,” takes us – shot or shunted – down into night, the imaginal-space of gestation. Mina Loy’s daughter-poet, Hume composes a Baedeker of the body pregnant, mapping a haunted landscape with a language she makes strange, dream wording a dream world: “I hear myself coming from your thoughts . . . Skull pockets that burn without warnings.” Continue reading “Shot”

The beauty of Graciela Limon’s writing lies in her unadorned, tell-it-like-it-is style. While you’re reading, you don’t get tripped up and mesmerized by crafty phrases and descriptions so original that you have to stop and think in order to actually see them. All you see in The River Flows North is character. People. Their painful pasts, difficult voyages, and hopeful futures. Continue reading “The River Flows North”

Tsim Tsum derives its title from an idea in Kabbalah that a being cannot truly exist unless the creator departs from his creation. This must refer to the fact that the two main characters, Walter B. and Beatrice, seem like abandoned children left to find their way through a fairy-tale landscape of allegorical friends and props. Rather, the spirit must have left them and their world midway through creation, as both characters have just enough intelligence to be confused. This is the central dilemma of Tsim Tsum. Continue reading “Tsim Tsum”

Selected by David Shapiro for the National Poetry Series, Sarah O’Brien’s debut book of poetry appears at first glance to be an extended meditation on photography. The collection is divided into seven sections, with each one made up of lyric poems investigating what it means to see something – to capture a moment, even if it’s blurred. Continue reading “Catch Light”

It seems fitting that this debut short story collection by Lori Ostlund won the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction, because Ostlund’s writing has a classic, timeless feel to it that would not have been out of place in O’Connor’s time. The title story, the first story in the book, could have been written last week or fifty years ago. Ostlund creates an eccentric nanny, Ilsa Maria Lumpkin, charming enough to rival Mary Poppins, though life for her two charges, Veronica and Martin, is no fairy tale. Ostlund writes with great sensitivity about children, and the inability of adults to understand their point of view. In addition to the title story, “The Day You Were Born” and “All Boy” both deal with a child’s view of their parents’ crises; in the former, a young girl copes with her father’s mental illness and the resulting disintegration of her parents’ marriage, and in the latter, an effeminate eleven year old boy copes with the stigma of being different, at the same time that his father admits that he is gay and moves out of the house. Continue reading “The Bignessof the World”

This volume, which won the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize, features six pieces that bring the realities of human nature into focus. It is the realities, not the dramatics, that Glasser writes about. His stories have familiar surroundings, familiar people, and are written in prose that is a flowing, melodious tune – one you could hum. Continue reading “Dangerous Places”

I can honestly say Death at Solstice by Lucha Copri has taught me something. I like mystery novels. I’ve avoided reading them if I could for most of my life because I thought I didn’t like them. Now, this is not the first mystery I’ve read, but it did confirm that I enjoy the genre, something I’d been wondering about recently. It’s likely that having started reading this thinking that I didn’t like the mystery genre may have led me to being more critical of this story than I normally would have been towards a novel. Having said that, there were a great many things about this novel that I did enjoy. Continue reading “Death at Solstice”

As Richard Hoffman is equally well known for his verse as his prose, it should come as no surprise that the thirteen stories (plus six interstitial very short-shorts) in this volume are at times lyrical, often beautiful, and move with a sense of rhythm and deep perception. Continue reading “Interferenceand Other Stories”

How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace is the recipient of the Rose Metal Press Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. A collection of 10 works of very short fiction, Lovelace’s book is as much about movement as it is about structural deception. Continue reading “How Some People Like Their Eggs”

Interstitial fiction is imaginative writing that slips through the cracks between literary genres. It’s an umbrella term under which numerous stylistic approaches like new weird, slipstream, fantastica, liminal fantasy, transrealism, and many more may fall. Though these terms lack precision, they do bear some resemblance to more established genres, using familiar science fiction tropes like spaceships and aliens, time travel and alternate histories; fantasy tropes like ghosts, fairies, as well as mystery and romance conventions. Interstitial fiction is distinguished by how it blurs the boundaries between genres and, if ever placed in one of these slots, rests uncomfortably. It blends the realistic and the fantastic in such a way that everything is defamiliarized, or where everything is (borrowing a term coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky) “enstranged.” Paradoxically, it is its “in-betweeness” that defines it. Continue reading “Interfictions 2”

Ever wondered about those Americans who take jobs in treacherous foreign countries? Ever wanted to know what it is like to move to the Middle East and try to fit in to conservative Islamic culture? Anastasia Hobbet’s novel Small Kingdoms answers these questions through its carefully structured narrative. Set in Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Small Kingdoms takes place in a region familiar to us from TV news broadcasts; Hobbet portrays the decadence and the difficulty of this country masterfully. The story follows five main characters: two American expatriates, one native Kuwaiti woman and her Indian maid, and one a Bedooin or resident alien, a Palestinian woman living in Kuwait. Hobbet constructs her book in short chapters, each following a single character, as these five individuals’ fates are drawn closer and closer together. Continue reading “Small Kingdoms”

This is the second year of this anthology which features poetry, flash fiction, short-short story, short story, genre fiction, creative nonfiction, young writers, and novella. There is a total of 28 works from 21 authors and the editor proudly points out in his introduction that entries came from 32 states and eight foreign countries. Two of the winners were from overseas: Jerusalem, Israel and Bogotá, Columbia. All judging was done blind. Continue reading “Press 53 2009 Open Awards Anthology”

The bad news: if you have a less than comprehensive knowledge of British history and culture (as I do), you may have to run to Google periodically to understand all the acronyms and historical references in Gardam’s novel. The good news: it won’t matter. Gardam’s book is primarily a character study, the affectionate chronicle of a long marriage between two flawed but lovable characters. Continue reading “The Man in the Wooden Hat”

It should come as no surprise that the ten stories in Lorraine Lopez’s collection Homicide Survivors Picnic make an impact, bringing the reader face-to-face with situations that are realistic and gritty but never hopeless or pitiful. Lopez, the winner of the International Latino Book Award for short stories, among other accolades, handles intricate characters and complex emotions deftly, all while spinning out plots that are captivating and believable. Continue reading “Homicide Survivors Picnic”

As the epigraph from Gertrude Stein suggests, Hush Sessions is a collection of poetry interested in wordplay, but Kristi Maxwell’s new book also assesses ways of approaching intimacy and fertility in long-term relationships. By presenting the body as imperfect, these poems expose the disappointment a lack of control brings. Continue reading “Hush Sessions”

French author Marcel Proust created an acknowledged masterpiece of modern literature in his 3,000 page novel The Remembrance of Things Past, which is also known as In Search of Lost Time, first published in seven volumes from 1913 to 1927. Patrick Alexander’s guide to this work serves as an introduction to readers who haven’t yet read Proust’s masterpiece, a useful tool for those in the process of reading it, and a refresher for readers who’d like to revisit favorite passages. Continue reading “Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time”

Aside from the eye catching distressed-look cover design of Gina Myers's new poetry collection, A Model Year, one of the endorsement blurbs on the back cover snared my attention. The blurb wherein critically acclaimed poet Joseph Lease assigns to Myers work a "New York school sprezzetura" informed my reading of Myers's collection, which is one good reason I usually forego the reading of such matter until after my initial opinion has been formed. Not so this time. Continue reading “A Model Year”

My poetry workshop recently concluded all poems are about loss. To a certain extent, all stories are too. Maureen Sherbondy’s short stories in The Slow Vanishing definitely follow this theme. The title is evidence, as are the stories inside. There are vanishing limbs, vanishing mothers, vanishing children, and vanishing commas. In many cases, Sherbondy literalizes an emotional loss. A husband doesn’t just feel like his wife is lost because she isn’t doing her normal routine; she actually is lost, and he has to deal with it. Parents don’t feel like they’ve lost their children when they head out on their own; the children actually fly away. This literalization is a wonderfully imaginative way to tell a story, as well as great way to raise crucial questions about life, and how it can be lived. Continue reading “The Slow Vanishing”

Excerpted from the novel Falcons on the Floor, Justin Sirois’s MLKNG SCKLS is ostensibly the story of a road trip across a war-torn landscape. Actually, these aren’t excerpts but excised texts, deleted Word documents from narrator Salim Abid’s laptop intended for the novel Abid wrote while escaping from Fallujah to Ramadi with his friend Khalil. Salim’s epistolary accounts are composed on his laptop and are sectioned off by how much remaining battery power his laptop has. It’s a striking metafictional device that evocatively suggests that time may also be literally running out for Salim and Khalil. As Salim’s laptop’s battery power percentage decreases, the characters’ uncertainty increases. At any moment, you think that Salim will get the pop-up balloon saying: “Low Battery: You should change your battery or switch to outlet power immediately to keep from losing your work.” Continue reading “MLKNG SCKLS”

Being a bit of a history buff, I was excited to read Her Highness’ First Murder by Peg Herring. I must admit that my knowledge of the Tudor period is mostly confined to the early part of Henry VIII’s reign, but even so, I felt as if Herring accurately portrayed the personalities of her characters during the later part of his reign. Continue reading “Her Highness’ First Murder”

If you are prowling for something truly chilling to read, Edgar and International Horror Guild Award-nominated author Brian Evenson’s collection of unsettling short fiction, Fugue State, may be just the thing to curdle your blood. Accompanied by illustrations from the multi-talented graphic novelist Zak Sally, Fugue State also includes an evocative graphic short that brings “Dread” to life. Each of the book’s nineteen stories include subjects who tenuously skirt the borderlines of sanity and the edges of awareness, of substantive reality. Significantly, Evenson successfully marries the usually disparate genres of horror and literary fiction. Continue reading “Fugue State”

Johnny ‘Blue’ Heron is a private eye more interested in sex and alcohol than the steady job he could have with the local police. Blue is hired by George Fuller to trai his son to find out if the younger Fuller is having an affair. This deceptively simple job lands Blue in the middle of affairs, intrigue, incest, corruption, and some rather shady business deals. Blue comes off as cynical sort of fellow, believing that no one is quite what they appear to be (“Always thought I was a fake, but aren’t we all. We invent ourselves and defy the world to discover the ruse.”), but he is surprisingly unaware of some people’s darker sides. Continue reading “Swan Dive”

Synopsizing her own book The Subversive Scribe, Suzanne Jill Levine in “Cositas Are Not Things,” the book’s penultimate chapter, writes: Continue reading “The Subversive Scribe”

Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery’s slim but savory novel, is like poetry served on a platter – filled with dazzling and delicious language. The story begins with the world’s most famous (and most despised) food critic realizing that he will die in 48 hours. Monsieur Pierre Arthens lives in Paris, in the building immortalized in Barbery’s first novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Continue reading “Gourmet Rhapsody”

Few aspects of personal experience are taboo any longer, but Lorraine López has collected a set of essays in this anthology that address an emerging topic of national conversation: what does it mean to grow up poor? In our current cultural moment, when the availability of health care for all Americans is being negotiated, the concerns of this collection are particularly sage. Continue reading “An Angle of Vision”

A handsome former soap star, tired of his shallow, fat-free life, kidnaps a pastry chef to do his bidding. A woman, suddenly obsessed with the domestic arts, breaks into someone’s home and begins cooking and cleaning while they’re gone. We all have strange, fleeting impulses – Suzanne Burns’s characters act on them. Continue reading “Misfits and Other Heroes”

The 35 fiction pieces and 15 poems from The Sun magazine collected for this anthology deal with passion, longing, and romantic love. As editor Sy Safransky so aptly describes this work, “[It is] about the room upstairs at the end of the hall, shared by two lovers who’ve decided to stay – for a weekend or forever, no one can say. Sometimes they kiss, sometimes they bite. They dream they’re in heaven. They swear they’re in hell. That room.” This room is occupied by a range of men and women of various cultures, ages, and sexual persuasions, and, as with any and all relationships, the dynamics of each relationship portrayed here is as individual as its author could imagine. Continue reading “The Mysterious Life of the Heart”

Missing Her is a moving, elegant series of poems, or elegies, that examines loss on both a very public and a private level. Keelan’s topics include Mary after the birth of Jesus, the Vietnam War, September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, and the death of her father. In “About Suffering They Were,” she writes, “There are no old poems, / Only new textbooks directing / The unprepared student to the painting / Behind the poem.” In Missing Her, we are all unprepared students, and Keelan leads us not merely to her poems but to the truths behind poetry. Continue reading “Missing Her”

Steven Schroeder and his brain like to wander. Whether physically through the landscapes of Colorado, or mentally through recollections of schadenfreude, Schroeder drags his rucksack of modern references behind him. String theory, Asimov, army-town life, thermodynamics – all pop up naturally in the course of his bizarre musings. Continue reading “Torched Verse Ends”

This children’s picture book follows Sophie’s search for the warmest place in her house after spending time outside playing in the snow. Ultimately, the warmest place is snuggled up next to her parents in their bed during the middle of the night. The story is light and sweet while the illustrations are delightful and fun. Altogether, a great book for bedtime. Continue reading “The Warmest Place of All”

I loved this book! I think I fell in love with it the first time the main character, Lee, mentions Anne of Green Gables and her excitement about meeting a “real-life orphan,” Cassandra, who is moving in with a relative next door. Anne was my favorite character from children’s books when I was a kid. She felt like a real person to me – a friend, someone I wanted to meet, someone I wanted to be like, someone I was – dare I say it? – jealous of – exactly the way Lee feels. But being an orphan in real life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as Lee finds out when she becomes friends with Cassandra. Continue reading “Home Free”

Falco begins this novel by introducing us, one by one, to the characters: Avery, a rebellious art student at Penn State, Lindsey and Hank, Avery’s aunt and uncle, and Kate, Avery’s widowed mother who is having an affair with Hank, her brother-in-law. The main story involves Avery and Grant, a thirty-something former performance artist from New York she meets at a campus party. Avery runs away to New York with the mysterious Grant after knowing him for less than 24 hours. In New York, Avery is thrown into the heart of the avant-garde art scene; Grant’s friends include a famous artist, a successful TV writer and a restaurateur. Grant himself had early success as a writer, but after he killed a man in self-defense while trucking stolen goods across state lines for his shady uncle Billy, he stopped writing. Now Grant’s only source of income is further work for Billy, who keeps him on the fringes of his criminal enterprises out of respect for his brother, Grant’s father. Continue reading “Saint John of the Five Boroughs”

In his second collection of short fiction, Tod Goldberg delivers ten seductive stories that target the traumatic reality of failed dreams and the struggle to make amends with the past. Each kinetic story pulses and pops with authenticity. Goldberg has not a word misplaced, often times weaving tragedy and beauty with the result of heartbreaking height, similar in style to Mark Richard or Thom Jones. His characters find themselves trapped, whether literally or figuratively – lost in a world where they cannot connect with the projected image of themselves or attain the goal of a satisfied life. In one of the most moving and powerful stories “Walls,” Goldberg navigates the fractured childhood of an unspecified number of siblings, using We as the narrator, dissecting their Mother’s sexual relationships to ultimate and devastating effects. Continue reading “Other Resort Cities”

“I try to name the thing we never missed until it was lost, all the things that never stood a chance in this beautiful world.” So ends “My Neighbor Doesn’t Remember Everything She Forgets” from Stephanie Johnson’s debut One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, and it may well serve as a capsule of its concerns: to carefully observe life’s vicissitudes, to spotlight minutiae, to bear witness. The book is filled with internal squalls and domestic squabbles. In story after story, scene after scene, there is Johnson’s unwavering focus, and you can almost see her sharpening her senses. Continue reading “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others”

In the introduction to her most recent book of poetry, Van Gogh in Poems, Carol Dine writes of the research she undertook to pen her artist-inspired poems. Her book, she writes, led her to Amsterdam three times, where she visited the Van Gogh Museum to study the artist’s original work – up close. Dine describes how she was allowed to sit in a room while an attendant brought her requested works on paper. She studied them for inspiration, and deemed them holy. Her viewing of the artist’s sketchbook brought her to tears. Van Gogh in Poems contains 18 plates of the artist’s works on paper. Continue reading “Van Gogh in Poems”

The characters that populate Nathan Graziano’s new book of poetry, After the Honeymoon, remind me of my neighbors and friends growing up in working class Philadelphia: many of these folks had rough, troubled lives, and more often than not happiness was squelched by substance abuse, poverty, poor education, and unemployment. It was the rare exception that someone had the self-reflection and self-discipline to ascend the neighborhood’s social pitfalls. While Graziano’s book could be set in almost any working poor urban area in our country, its depictions of hard-scrabbled living – and the desire to rise above it – is utterly familiar to my autobiography and is refreshing to see in contemporary poetry. Continue reading “After the Honeymoon”

In a 1948 conversation with John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac said, “Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation.” The phrase, like Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation,” soon became emblematic of its time, though not all of its adherents approve of the label (Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder are just three of its detractors). What most of the “Beats” found in Beats at Naropa have in common is their connection with Kerouac himself. The book contains mostly transcripts of speeches and conversations held at what is now called Naropa University but what was originally known as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a compulsively readable volume, full of facts and opinions. Continue reading “Beats at Naropa: An Anthology”

Life Goes to the Movies tells of the uncanny friendship of two men growing up in the 1970s. Both men struggle to define who they are in a world where they don’t seem to fit in. Nigel DePoli, son of Italian immigrants, wants desperately to be someone with a sense of belonging. Dwaine Fitzgibbon is looking for a way to be separate from society while still intermingling enough to show others the parts of life that they don't normally see. Their bond begins in a mutual love of movies and only grows stronger as they start making short films that show “true life” rather than losing “themselves in some totally made up bullshit that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with real life.” However, things change as Dwaine becomes more passionate about his movies and Nigel desires more and more the ‘normal’ life that Dwaine diverted him from. The reader will find themselves laughing at some of Dwaine’s outrageous ideas and rooting for the friends when things seem to be at their lowest point. An enjoyable read from the beginning, Selgin grabs the reader’s interest and drags them along for all of Nigel and Dwaine’s fascinating adventures in life and film. Continue reading “Life Goes to the Movies”

Even for a novella (though the publishers call it a novel) of slightly over one hundred and thirty pages, there is not a lot of plot movement in Rupert: A Confession. The story is basic: the protagonist, Rupert, gives a three-art confession to a jury about a crime he was alleged to commit. In the process, we discover he has a vast array of pornography meticulously cataloged, has been thrown out of massage parlor for ejaculating on the proprietor, and conceives of his own life as either a stage production or an offspring of Japanese warriors. Otherwise, the book centers on the rise and fall of his idealized girlfriend Mira, who at turns is taciturn, cranky, or sexually insatiable. Continue reading “Rupert: A Confession”

Even for a novella (though the publishers call it a novel) of slightly over one hundred and thirty pages, there is not a lot of plot movement in Rupert: A Confession. The story is basic: the protagonist, Rupert, gives a three-art confession to a jury about a crime he was alleged to commit. In the process, we discover he has a vast array of pornography meticulously cataloged, has been thrown out of massage parlor for ejaculating on the proprietor, and conceives of his own life as either a stage production or an offspring of Japanese warriors. Otherwise, the book centers on the rise and fall of his idealized girlfriend Mira, who at turns is taciturn, cranky, or sexually insatiable. Continue reading “Rupert: A Confession”

What would you give up to pursue a dream? In this rich and wonderful novel for people of all ages, a 9-year-old boy named Niner is willing to sell his guardian angel in exchange for money so that he and his friend, a homeless man called Cosmos, can travel to the sea and open an “ice cold drinks” stand. But once Niner sells his guardian angel, a terrible thing happens: he is left without protection, vulnerable to any whim of fate, germ, or accident. The story’s plot hinges on this one question: will he be able to get his guardian angel back before he dies? Continue reading “Beyond the Station Lies the Sea”

Every poem in Paschen's Bestiary has been carefully groomed; each poem still stays a little feral, mostly concerning what strange things we do in our own familiar homes: A woman bears the chrysalis of her son in her wandering body, a mother nurses amid a welter of storybook patterns, the vagaries of gods and storms and men thunder in the background… Continue reading “Bestiary”

This microscopic look at France’s attempt to join two different parts of the world through outside labor is done in an honest and unbiased way through the two very different characters of Thomas and Byron. W.B. Garvey, the author of this climatic and colorful novel, writes with a straightforward and no-games-played style that evokes as broad a spectrum of emotion as the music Garvey is famous for playing on his violin. In his novel, Panama Fever, Garvey details the beginning stages of what we now know as the Panama Canal, enriching the pages with truthful character and landscape settings. Continue reading “Panama Fever”

Andean Express by Bolivian journalist Juan de Recacoechea follows a slew of intriguing characters on an overnight train ride from Bolivia to Chile. Continue reading “Andean Express”

Andrew Zornoza’s expansive, fragmentary Where I Stay is a piecemeal construction of text and image. An epigraph, penned in 1938 by Walker Evans, simultaneously urges the reader and the eye behind the camera to focus on “[t]hese anonymous people who come and go in the cities and who move on the land,” on “what is in their faces and in the windows and the streets beside and around them.” Fittingly, it is just those elements, particular to an individual’s specific moment, time and place, that capture the anonymous sense of the national spirit. Continue reading “Where I Stay”

The wind. The East China Sea. Time gnawing on the shore. In the eight assured short stories in his first collection, Yoon takes us through fifty years on the fictional Korean island of Solla, where his characters map out lives eroded by warfare and polished by a series of tender passing moments. Continue reading “Once the Shore”

Matthew Vollmer’s impressive debut collection grates its characters against their fate, pitting their desires and their beliefs against each other as these brightly rendered tales unfold. These are well constructed, richly polished stories that rely heavily on nuanced events to deliver powerful and precise emotion. Characters struggle with sexuality, social acceptance, and death – often times through the filter of non-mainstream Christian faith. The result is an odd and heightened sense of guilt and grief. Continue reading “Future Missionaries of America”

[Here’s my flash review of Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction:] Continue reading “The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction”