The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Stories by Aimee Bender. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. All elements are on fire in Aimee Bender’s startling and funny debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Set predominantly in San Francisco and parts unknown, these sixteen stories boldly and confidently explore the nature of failed…
Stygo A novel by Laura Hendrie. MacMurray & Beck, $16.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. Although Laura Hendrie’s first novel, Stygo, focuses on the tiny beet growers’ town of Stygo, Colorado, it is in no way limited by its narrow geographic boundaries. To the contrary, Hendrie’s brilliantly precise writing offers an organic view of…
Readers of literary magazines and anthologies frequently speak of Stuart Dybek's stories with reverence, and they will certainly covet The Coast of Chicago, his second collection, which brings together several works already deemed classics: "Hot Ice," "Blight," and "Pet Milk." Seven long stories are interleaved with seven shorter ones, and they are bound so tightly…
The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 Poems by Jack Gilbert. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Daniel. One of the joys of reading Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires is how stubbornly it celebrates the courage and beauty found in the most habitual, commonly shared moments of our lives. This will come as news to no one…
Sunday. As a title, it is somehow exactly right, and it has the curiously precise, poker-faced character of a good Lux poem. But Sunday is also, of course, what happens after Saturday night; it is both the day of grace and everyone's day off, both the worst and the best of days, depending, of course,…
The Coast of Good Intentions Stories by Michael Byers. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin. $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In nearly every story in The Coast of Good Intentions, a debut collection by Michael Byers, there is the beguiling and disconcerting sense that all the real action is happening offstage, that offstage people are cheating on…
If a work of art is the realization of one's deepest imaginative processes, including the dream process, then everything that an artist produces becomes part of his own privately-ordered collection, which as a matter of course moves into the public domain. In this literal sense, Brian Moore's Great Victorian Collection can be viewed as a…
Maura Stanton recommends Swamp Candles, poems by Ralph Burns: “In his new book, Ralph Burns fuses the two major strands in American poetry. His spare images dazzle us with their precision, while his colloquial voice moves us with its vital rhythms and deep emotions.” (Univ. of Iowa)
Dan Wakefield recommends The Collected Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman, stories by Bruce Jay Friedman: “One of the funniest writers of our time, the first American master of black humor fiction, he’s collected his best stories in one volume. ‘Brazzaville Teenager’ is the best thing since Ring Lardner.” (Donald I. Fine)
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