NewPages Blog :: Books

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is his first young adult book, but don’t let that put you off reading it. This is perhaps the first essential book I’ve read this year, the first novel that feels important enough to recommend it to every single person I discuss books with. While it will resonate best with teens, who will identify closely with its protagonist and his friends, the issues covered over the course of the story are important enough to matter to every American reader. Continue reading “Little Brother”

The Midwestern voice has been with us long enough now that sometimes we forget that, like all innovations, it once required inventing. The Chinese capacity for understatement is something that I have also taken for granted, not remembering that such stances would be considered a departure from our American ancestors of Whitman and Dickenson. Warren Woessner recently reminded me of this unexpected connection between the Minnesota miller and Tang aristocrat in a brief interview below his Minneapolis law office, eloquently providing his own juxtaposition. Continue reading “Clear All the Rest of the Way”

Matt Schumacher’s first collection of poetry is an otherworldly journey of linguistic inventiveness that keeps you directly on this earth while simultaneously transporting you to locations that at first glance appear strange or surreal but become familiar once you peer into their profound insides. These poems make up a cosmic parade where you will meet cowboys from Venus, pizzas that fly and ghosts who haunt spaceships. Ultimately, these poems are about the redemption of humanity in spite of the obstacles you have to overcome and the distances you must travel to arrive at familiar, yet alien, destinations. The poem “Old West Town Discovered on Venus” takes the reader on a journey to one of these planets: Continue reading “Spilling the Moon”

For many American readers, Etgar Keret’s 2006 collection The Nimrod Flipout was the book that first introduced them to this excellent Israeli writer. With his short, fable-like stories combining a fantastical whimsy with the political and social realities of the Middle East, Keret’s stories felt like they burst onto the scene from nowhere, while in reality it was his second American book taken from the five collections already published in Israel. Like its predecessors, The Girl on the Fridge contains a wealth of Keret’s short stories, including some that will truly amaze the reader at how much power he can pack into a two- or three-page story, or, even more impressively, into a one-paragraph story, like the opener “Asthma Attack,” quoted here in its entirety: Continue reading “The Girl on the Fridge”

A Proper Knowledge, Michelle Latiolais’s follow up to the family-centered novel Even Now, is another novel focused around family and relationships. Luke is a dedicated, perceptive Los Angeles doctor with a practice treating autistic children – his career choice influenced by his own late sister, a schizophrenic whose memory haunts him at times. Continue reading “A Proper Knowledge”

Emily Galvin likes details. In her mini-plays that make up the first half of the book, she pencils every texture, breath, and tilt of head with conspicuous meticulousness, as if the rabid observation of minutiae should yield meaning like the sudden breakthrough in a mathematical proof. This approach often leads to pieces that are more description than dialogue, but with focus that renders it powerful, rather than an inanely panning camera eye. The terse dialogues that do ensue have an amplified gravity, and given their binary form, cannot fail to call up Endgame or another of Beckett’s masterpieces. Continue reading “Do the Math”

Something wired very hard into the human psyche lights up at the notion of discovering hidden things, putting the pieces together and finally accessing occult knowledge – wisdom or treasure or whatever seems to be missing from human experience – things which, when uncovered, could possibly explain our present situation and hopefully unlock the power to choose our future with certainty. Zachary Mason touches, tickles, and strikes these wires in The Lost Books of the Odyssey and, in the end, creates nothing short of a synaptic fireworks display. Continue reading “The Lost Books of the Odyssey”

You’re in an abandoned house. The floorboards are damp and creak under you – what was the reason, again, you decided to go bare-footed? And once in a while something brushes against your face. Sometimes it’s the stray end of a cobweb, sometimes the rusty pull-chain to the chandelier. Sometimes you don’t know. Of course, the lights don’t work. You’re not quite ready to leave, but you’re starting to look for a way out. Sometimes you find stairs going up to strange cupboards; other times the stairs bear you down into musty basements. Continue reading “O Woolly City”

Gary Amdahl’s I Am Death collects two novellas, the crime story “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Monster (A Story of Chicago)” and “Peasants,” a tale of hostile office politics. The two novellas are strikingly different in setting and tone, allowing Amdahl to display a range of abilities as both a writer and a storyteller. Continue reading “I Am Death”

The poems in Jane Augustine’s A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing confront, rather than bypass pain, and their “golden and piercing” music is made from a rugged but precise lineation and a relentless eye for detail. Continue reading “A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing”

The collected work thus far of Peter Markus could be likened to an early earth encyclopedia, or a table of the elements. In Markus’s world, though, the elements are not cryptic chemical symbols devised and laid in line by science. Instead, they are the epoxy of existence – they are the things we know without having to decipher, they are brothers, fish and mud. One could cut to most any page in a Markus apparatus and find these common images there repeated, like age lines encased in a tree trunk. Markus’s word channels the innate. Each sentence placed next to one another as if by nature, his layered phrases cause an incantation. Continue reading “Bob, or Man on Boat”

No human thing is more universal than illness, in all its permutations, and no literary publication holds more credibility on the subject than The Bellevue Literary Review. I say this with upmost confidence as an English professor, a registered nurse, and as someone who recognizes the historical and philosophical origins (and namesake) of this fine literary periodical: Bellevue Hospital Center. Continue reading “The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review”

“Beware the impractical man,” warns the narrator of the title story of David Galef’s chapbook collection of short and flash fiction: “Their wives either cherish or divorce them, and their sons and daughters, in reaction, often grow commonsensical and a little costive.” That’s funny, but we shouldn’t miss the menacing undercurrent. The unfortunate ideas of Bernardo Lazar – a backyard smelter, a “Reaction Recovery” device, and “a project about giant vegetables” – put his wife and young children through a comic set of trials. So light is Galef’s touch that we hardly notice, until the final sentence, that the Lazar family has come undone. Continue reading “A Man of Ideas”

Rusty Barnes’s Breaking It Down collects nearly twenty flash fictions into an attractive, pocket-size book, a rare instance where the size of the book accurately depicts the size of the stories. Luckily, it is only the page counts of the stories that are small, as the themes and characters contained within each tale loom larger than life, like the low-class tall tales they are. Continue reading “Breaking It Down”

The cover of Jon Pineda’s second collection, The Translator’s Diary, which depicts a graceful and nebulous spiral, is eerily reflective of the poems it obscures. Pineda’s poems turn in on themselves, each a pointed and intimate introspection sheathed in the gauze of the lyric, accruing momentum in a sort of ripple effect as the book progresses. Continue reading “The Translator’s Diary”

It would be easy to urge you to read The Human Mind because of the natural lure of the characters that people its short prose. There’s a man made of smoke and another of glass; a woman who slips her fingers into the stringy coagulation of her thoughts kept in a bowl; an impoverished Edgar Allan Poe who supports himself “on what he could squeeze out of his brain, a kind of black milk of his words.” Continue reading “The Human Mind”

Jean Echenoz’s latest work Ravel, translated from French, is a novelistic rendering of the final ten years in the life of Maurice Ravel, a wildly famous French concert pianist and composer. Adhering to the musician’s real life in extraordinary detail, Echenoz pens a seamless entry and exit into the previously unexplored soundscape of Ravel’s mind. In a novel consisting of only 117 pages, there isn’t one unnecessary syllable, let alone a dissonant note. Continue reading “Ravel”

Suzanne Burns’s Double Header is a slim chapbook comprised of just two short stories, “An Acquired Taste” and “Tiny Ron.” Both stories are full of magic (one more literally than the other), and both have marriage at their centers, both thematically and as plot devices. Continue reading “Double Header”

Dennis Must’s stories are at times both unsettling and tremblingly genuine, and once the reader gives herself over to them, worth consideration. Not that stories about immolation, cross-dressing, prostitutes, Bible study beauty pageants, family, and loss normally aren’t. It’s just that the stories come on slow, and before you know it, you’re sitting in your living room pondering whether you should be imagining a grieving widower dressing up in his dead wife’s clothing. Continue reading “Oh, Don’t Ask Why”

Those familiar with the writing of Kim Chinquee will be pleased to read the seventy-four flash fictions and prose poems collected in her book, Oh Baby, not only for the satisfaction of revisiting a few select, memorable pieces, but also for the opportunity to see Chinquee work at length, crafting with a spare and precise language the most complicated, emotional stories possible per page. Continue reading “Oh Baby”

Charles Jensen’s The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon is an ambitious book, highly entertaining yet formally daring. It incorporates a variety of prose and poetic forms to tell a love story that spans most of the twentieth-century and at least two dimensions, all within the space of a mere twenty-one pages. Comprised of diary entries, academic papers, and shredded documents full of supposed “automatic writing,” this slim volume weaves a mysterious love story with far greater gravity than its size on paper would suggest possible. Continue reading “The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon”

Li-Young Lee’s fourth collection of poetry is an elegiac march through a landscape of prayer, death, love, the eternal strife of family relations and the omnipresent political realities that come with the immigrant identity. More than any other theme, the status of the displaced illuminates these mysterious and evasively simplistic poems. Continue reading “Behind My Eyes”

In Elizabeth Crane’s You Must Be This Happy to Enter, her third collection of stories, she tempers a sometimes pessimistic worldview with an exuberant joy that suffuses her stories from start to finish. From the bouncing opening story “My Life is Awesome! And Great!” (which may contain more exclamation points than every other short story collection published this year combined) to the warm familial ending of “Promise,” Crane takes her quirky style and uses it to bring a variety of mostly female protagonists to life, including a woman who gets turned into a zombie at a JoAnn Fabrics store and ends up as a contestant on reality television, a girl obsessed with staying inside her boyfriend’s closet, and a teenager whose forehead is covered in ever-changing multi-colored words who meets a boy whose face displays polaroids. Continue reading “You Must Be This Happy to Enter”

The poems in Andrew Kozma’s City of Regret spring from a source of electric personality and emotion, striving to escape grief by staring at it unblinkingly until it becomes something else. Surrealistic images stretch and bend until they encounter recognizable truths. Metaphors, which may at first appear too close in the mirror, shift to give perspective: the poem becomes a unified field of beauty. For example, in “The Cleansing Power of Metaphor” we see: Continue reading “City of Regret”

The title of this collection ambitiously suggests that after the first part of translations, the following variations and responses should enlighten our skies and blow us away. And while it doesn’t deliver the promised symphony of fire, it does burn in a few impressions that will last after the words have faded. Continue reading “Spring Wind Brings the Fireworks”

Sloane Crosley’s debut collection of essays is the kind of book that causes deep bouts of guilty recognition almost as often as it induces laughing out loud. Crosley’s essays are self-deprecating and self-obsessed, written with a style reminiscent of David Sedaris but with a voice that’s all her own. Chronicling her disasters more often than her successes, Crosley relates everyday abilities like constantly losing her wallet and locking herself out of two different apartments on moving day, plus more specialized skills at ruining weddings and investigating unexpected “presents” left on her bathroom floor after dinner parties. The best of these is “Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day,” about the ancient computer game The Oregon Trail, and Crosley’s subversive playing style: Continue reading “I Was Told There’d Be Cake”

Alex Rose’s The Musical Illusionist is a work of ambitious fantasy, written not as a novel or a collection of stories but as a guide to the myth-like Library of Tangents, “an archive not of history but of possibility.” These fictions (which are not properly stories, with the possible exception of the excellent title piece) take the form of articles describing the Library’s many exhibitions, including fantastical cultures, books, paintings, numerous foreign lands, even psychological disorders and microorganisms. Each entry is written so credibly that disorientation and disbelief go hand in hand, as the convincing prose and accompanying diagrams, photos, and maps seek to stun the reader into believing in even the most outlandish of exhibits. Continue reading “The Musical Illusionist”

The characters in John Brandon’s crime noir novel Arkansas are men who, finding themselves unsuitable for the everyday world of work, leave the straight life behind for more illicit activities. When twenty-something Kyle Ribbis is laid off from his job in a bicycle shop, the narrator explains: Continue reading “Arkansas”

Nate Pritts lives in a sealed chamber. At least, I think he does, or wishes he did. Whether the voice in his poems is his own or an invented persona is unclear, but the question is soon overwhelmed by the noisy glass cubicle of his poetic consciousness – things don’t hesitate to boom, explode, and self-destruct. The place simply simmers with internal threat. After all, volcanoes are exploding here, dinosaurs are waiting, lighting strikes, the roller coaster won’t stop, the wind won’t stop, violent floods of emotion assail him, and the light is dangerously perfect. But you only know it because he tells you so. You can’t see it. You can’t break through those glass barriers – no one can. Not the woman Pritts longs after with potent intensity, and not the nameless friends he apparently lives amongst. Continue reading “Sensational Spectacular”

Twenty years after her first short story collection, Yannick Murphy returns to the form with In a Bear’s Eye, the follow-up book to her highly acclaimed 2007 novel Signed, Mata Hari. The stories contained within are spare and elegant, most clocking in at no more than four or five pages. Continue reading “In a Bear’s Eye”

William Walsh’s debut novel, Without Wax, is the story of Wax Williams, legendary male porn star and “the 8th wonder of the world,” whose shy, down-to-earth demeanor endears him to female fans while also making him accessible to male fans. Dissatisfied with (and even afraid for) his life, Wax decides to retire at the pinnacle of his career. In keeping with documentary form and style, Walsh weaves together interview fragments, traditional narrative, depositions, Consumer Profiles, and the script of Wax’s first feature film. The novel is structured in such a way that is entertaining and compulsively readable, getting as close to watching its filmic incarnation as the written word will allow. Continue reading “Without Wax”

As the singer and songwriter of the indie rock band The Mountain Goats, John Darnielle has often been called a “literary” rocker, thanks to the great lyrics contained in the approximately four hundred songs produced by that band. Whether listening to lo-fi productions of his earlier career or the more musically complex John Vanderslice-produced records he’s done with 4AD, the focus of Darnielle’s fans has always been on his lyrics and the stories contained within. Now he’s stepped off the stage and sat down at the typewriter to deliver Master of Reality, his first novel and a stunning piece of rock criticism and appreciation. Continue reading “Master of Reality”

Like the mysterious dominoes that grace the cover suggest, Matthea Harvey’s poetry collection Modern Life deals surprise and gambles sentiment, tossing out disjointed associations with such daring that only the most careful reading will unravel the whole chain of implication. Harvey puts her strongest, most readable poems in the center, creating a core of potential energy to propel the reader through the peculiar, disorienting landscapes still to come. The strategy pays off, giving the book both symmetry and a needed respite from her more difficult works. Continue reading “Modern Life”

In some ways, Ander Monson’s new chapbook Our Aperture finds the writer up to his familiar tricks. Like his fiction and his essays, Monson’s poems are elegiac in mood, mourning the losses of old lovers and dead friends even as they pine for obscure shampoo ingredients and virtual realities. He concentrates his energies on lists of objects and failing technologies, on relics of recent memories, on complaints against the loved ones who once owned and inhabited the things and places that make up a life. Continue reading “Our Aperture”

In the tradition of Southern oral storytelling style, Jo Carson writes her stories for telling aloud. Teller Tales: Histories, her newest book, carries on this almost lost art of speaking and of handing down the history created by previous generations. According to Carson, both stories, “What Sweet Lips Can Do,” and “Men of Their Time,” were originally written to be performed. Unlike many other traditional texts that recount American historical events, Teller Tales is a narration, a performance of two stories wrapped around the American Revolutionary War. Neither monotonous nor mundane, Teller Tales reads as if the narrators are standing on a stage, talking, reminiscing, throwing laughable tidbits, and handing down what they know about the events that helped shape the America we know today. Continue reading “Teller Tales”

“Beverly puts words in jail. She hunts and traps them, stuffs them into little black boxes. Crosswords.” This quote from the beginning of Mary Otis’ short story “Picture Head” illustrates not only Otis’ skill with language, but also one of the over arcing themes in her first short story collection Yes, Yes, Cherries: the complacent trap we as humans must break out of if we are to live our life happily and completely. Continue reading “Yes, Yes, Cherries”

Meriwether Lewis can’t achieve death, much less the Northwest Passage. And his modern counterpart, Bill Lewis, can’t connect with himself, let alone the students he’s trying to instruct. Bill is simply stymied by his own life, and the suicidal end of Meriwether’s.

Roy Kesey’s debut story collection, All Over, was also the groundbreaking ceremony for Dzanc Books, a new publishing house based in Michigan. Dzanc “was created in 2006 to advance great writing and champion those writers who don’t fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses.” Dzanc did well to procure talent like Kesey to launch their press.

Continue reading “All Over”

Rick Campbell is a friend of mine, someone whose capacious heart and mind have served me as a touchstone of the genuine for over a decade. As director of Anhinga Press, as well as founder and director of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition (FLAC), Rick has performed immense and selfless service for poetry both in Florida and nationwide. For years he has advocated for good poetry, worked to make poetry a larger presence in our culture, and supported the work of his fellow poets. His work promoting other people’s writing has been so significant, in fact, that his own fine poetry, while not exactly overlooked, has garnered less attention than it deserves. His new book, Dixmont, outshines his previous collections by a long shot; it is a powerful, honest, finely-crafted book of emotionally-honed poems whose cumulative effect is simultaneously harrowing and life-affirming. Quite simply, Dixmont is the real thing, a genuine contribution to our poetry. Continue reading “Dixmont”

If you’re the kind of person who reads book reviews, you’re also probably the kind of person who occasionally says things like, “I don’t really watch that much TV,” or who likes to pretend they’ve never sang along to a boy band in the shower. If this in any way describes you, then prepare to squirm a little while you read Dave Housley’s Ryan Seacrest is Famous. This debut collection is littered with pop culture references, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll catch way more of them than you’d like. These stories, which originally appeared in magazines such as Nerve, Backward City Review, and Hobart, take on a variety of pop culture types, including reality television, professional wrestling, and wedding DJs. Fortunately for us, Housley goes past the most obvious hipster-ironic observations and into the more earnest territories reserved for true pop culture fanatics. Continue reading “Ryan Seacrest is Famous”

Jonathan Messinger’s debut collection of short stories, Hiding Out, hits the mark in every possible way. From the winding layout of the book, to the basic line drawings accompanying each story, to the wildly engaging story plots, Messinger’s book storms out of nowhere, his characters real enough to leave fingerprints on a windowpane. Continue reading “Hiding Out”

Like many readers my age, I grew up reading not literary fiction but the twin pillars of fantasy and science fiction.  As an adult, I’ve mostly left those pleasures behind, except for those genre-bending writers in the mainstream literary world, writers like George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Michael Chabon, or Jonathan Lethem. For the most part, I don’t regret the transition in my reading habits, but I do miss the invented worlds and cultures that came with the best genre writing. Thankfully, Steven Gillis has created just such a place in Bamerita, the floating island country of his newest novel, Temporary People.  Much like Tolkien raiding Norse and Christian mythologies to create his own world, Gillis paints his culture with shades of Central American dictators and revolutions, then puts American pop songs on his character’s lips while giving them the oppression, ingenuity, and knowledge needed to forge true revolutionaries from Bamerita’s most common citizens. Continue reading “Temporary People”

Whenever a man
leaves me
my beauty increases. Continue reading “A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor”

The nine linked stories in this collection follow Susan Stern, a New York City photo journalist who often finds herself operating between two lives. The life she leads in the U.S. has its problems, relationships mostly, but she does all right. Her personal and familial ties to Israel and the Middle East, however, provide a much richer source for conflict. Bombs in Haifa, buzzing helicopters, border patrol violence, a massacre in Palestine–these events are merely background noise compared to the nuanced consideration of the personal lives and family history deeply imbedded within this chaos. Continue reading “The Pale of Settlement”

The wonderings and wanderings of the maturing poet, recollected in elegy, self-deprecating humor, and moments of personal clarity seem to be a perennial favorite among Midwestern voices, and Chris Green’s first book clearly defines him as a champion of this mode. From his choice of puns and candid scenes to the obvious displays of technical skill and learning, Green exemplifies the ironies and neuroses that plague the writer who sees himself as Dante-prophet in the isolation of Midwest winters and towns. And his limits are as high as the skies over a Walgreens. Continue reading “The Sky Over Walgreens”