Spring 2013:
Reviews, reflections, conversations.
"Multiple storylines and plots, concerns on the personal, cultural, municipal, and global level: we weigh and handle these things with ease now, even more so when guided by a writer of Kushner's caliber." On Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and whether James Wood has acclimated. more
"Eggers does not insist that we care about Alan's predicament—the reader sometimes gets the impression that Alan himself wouldn't much care, were it not for his daughter's endangered future—but we do care. Alan is our after-the-decline Everyman." On A Hologram for the King. more
"By telling her own stories through poetry that is both quiet and matter-of-fact, Read manages to capture the convergence of death and life that is ever present for all of us." Instructions for My Mother's Funeral by Laura Read. Review by Sarah Seybold. more
"Dybek seems to suggest that though there might be no bridging the gap between a father and a son, we still try, and we still make choices that attempt to shorten that distance." When Captain Flint was Still a Good Man by Nick Dybek. Review by Doug Cornett. more
"I think for people like Jim it's like when a hot air balloon lands and a bunch of people run over to wrestle it down and force all the air out and carefully fold it up. Except Jim's trying to do all that by himself." A Q&A with the author of A Map of Tulsa. more
By Emily Burns Morgan
Jacob's Room is only her third book, and in many ways it seems to be her own coming-of-age story. In a sense, this is where she lays out the questions that will occupy her for the rest of her writing life...more
How did the media get to be like this? Why do we objectify the environment? The questions of the mythic characters are familiar because they're our own. We as readers should know the answers, but like the characters, we haven't 'got outside the circle of [our] mistakes.' more
Like all pointillism, no matter how fine the points, gaps remain. This is not realism, but not wholly abstract. It is an attempt that reveals all failures of articulation. And those are, finally, the meaning of the text. more
By Emily Burns Morgan
As time goes on, the young Bechdel trusts less and less that what she observes is truth. To 'save time,' she invents a symbol to stand in for the phrase 'I think.' It's not long before entire entries are covered over with this symbol...more
By Alan Limnis
There are 99 exercises in the original collection, and ten more that Queneau suggested as substitutions or published elsewhere. The exercises read like flashes of light that illuminate for a moment the linguistic contraptions and conventions under the hood of any number of...more
By Dan DeWeese
Banville's interest is in digging into a moment--an image, a feeling, a posture, a mood, or all of those things fused in a moment of resonant perception--and capturing it so well that we simply hunger for the next moment. His...more
Crafted, designed, choreographed, performed.
Art form of the twentieth century.
Stolen licks and backstage passes.
Investigations and lived experience.
Language, pushed.
Invented worlds, invented selves.
Reports from court and field.
"How did the media get to be like this? Why do we objectify the environment? The questions of the mythic characters are familiar because they're our own. We as readers should know the answers, but like the characters, we haven't 'got outside the circle of [our] mistakes.'" By Patrick McGinty
"If I hear about a lineman or a welder, say, who loves opera, I'm immediately interested in exploring that person—which is quite different from explaining that person." Mary Rechner chats with Nancy Zafris, author of the new story collection, The Home Jar.
"His images are not those of televised America, or of the great–events America of history textbooks, but of Americans who, in a country irrevocably changed and changing after World War II, went about the daily business of navigating—or inventing—life." By Dan DeWeese
