Author: andrew_ladd

In this week’s reviews on the blog, Claire Blechman calls Ned Zeman’s new book, Rules of the Tunnel, “a very L.A. memoir.” (“In the Manhattan version,” she adds, “we’d be spending lots of quality time in the patient-writer’s head.”) Julia Lichtblau seems to be getting at the same issue, sort of, in her review of…

You Are My Heart and Other Stories Jay Neugeboren Two Dollar Radio, May 2011 194 pages $16.00 All authors have subject matter to which they constantly return, consciously or not. For Dickens it was the lower classes, for John Irving it’s small town New Hampshire—and for Jay Neugeboren, in his new collection of stories, You…

The Pun Also Rises John Pollack Gotham Books, April 2011 240 pages $22.50 I’ve long loved wordplay, and long been puzzled, too, that many in the literary community don’t—especially, it seems, in my peculiar branch of it in Boston. Aren’t writers meant to be passionate about words and all their uses? Aren’t nuance and double…