Fasten your seat belts. Andrew Miller’s alternative lit style is about to take you on a bumpy ride. His memoir in essays, IF ONLY THE NAMES WERE CHANGED, vacillates between hyper-masculine and tender in terrain that traverses parental concerns about raising a daughter, drug and alcohol abuse, and how much of a jerk he is.
And though all the stories follow different lives and the situations they face, it is Farmer’s simultaneous childlike-wonder and knowing restraint that weave these stories together into one, strikingly cohesive collection.
Throughout her book, Chung reiterates the differences between extroverts and introverts, but eschews any claims of advantageousness. One person exults in a bar with his riotous friends while another broods in a library without anyone interrupting her. They’ll use different taps to distill pleasure from our world, but at the end of the night both find contentment.
When Donika Kelly’s debut collection of poetry, Bestiary, was released barely one month ago, it came as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a long-listed nominee for the 2016 National Book Award. From page one, it’s obvious why.
You have probably come across Michele Morano’s essay collection, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, at nonfiction conferences with presenters hailing it as an exemplary form of nonfiction. One of its essays, “The Queimada,” has been published in many anthologies. This contemporary classic illustrates the heights of the travel memoir genre.
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders Ed. by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton Workman, Sept.2016 480 pp; $35 Buy: hardcover | eBook Reviewed by Aaron Sommers If you’re like me, then you associate atlases with maps. Maybe it’s part of the larger, more detailed, colorful variety, but an atlas…
Remarkably, Lucinda seems both composition exercise and confession (“once again the text finds itself / helplessly stuck between two distinct / critical foci, pinioned”), as unclassifiable and as exciting as the more than 200-year-old book that inspired it.
By anchoring his collection around Aaron Kleinhardt, Wheeler creates subtle connections. The stories feel linked in an understated but solid way, creating a canvas with more depth than any one short story alone could give. Wheeler’s characters are people we know.
The protagonist in D. Foy’s second novel is that angry young kid whose pain and shame he cannot express except in strange orthogonal ways, ways that will only deepen his pain and shame, not alleviate them. But Foy allows us inside that boy’s beleaguered brain box and we feel every horrible sensation he is prone to…
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