Wild Ride Essays by Bia Lowe. HarperCollins, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Bonnie Friedman. Bia Lowe’s lovely first book, Wild Ride, uniquely combines nature essays with personal narrative. Each piece — composed of succulent, sweet prose — is a thought pagoda, ideas storied one atop another, from sneezes to alfalfa to sexual betrayal to Halley’s comet…
Professor Laura Coltelli of the University of Pisa has devoted many years to the oral and written literature, and the varied culture, of American Indians. She now brings us a revealing volume of interviews with eleven contemporary Indian writers. Six are women: Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, and Leslie…
Winning the City by Theodore Weesner. Summit Books. $17.95 cloth. Winning the City is a fine novel, a crisply written story about a young boy's struggle to define himself. Dale Wheeler's position on the school basketball team is unjustly taken from him, and what Dale does in response gives the novel its drive and theme….
Winter Range A novel by Claire Davis. Picador, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In Winter Range, Idaho writer Claire Davis offers a debut novel that effectively evokes small-town life on the Montana range and culminates in a breathtaking series of artfully constructed calamities. Predominantly from the third-person intimate points of view of the three…
The Question of Bruno Stories by Aleksander Hemon. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Peter Ho Davies. The stunning stories in this first collection by Bosnian exile Aleksander Hemon achieve the remarkable and delicate feat of being at once strikingly diverse in setting, style, and period, and subtly and sinuously intertwined. They range in…
Twin to the tree whose fruit Eve first tasted, and visible only after she ate, is the tree of immortal beauty, "hung with sweet fruit; / fruit that made the birds nesting there / graceful, brightly plumed and musical," writes Ellen Bryant Voigt in the title poem of her fourth and most overtly philosophical collection….
The stories in Eileen Pollack's first collection, The Rabbi in the Attic, occupy the delicate knife edges of human emotion with such utter solidity and weight that this writer keeps rereading in hope of discovering how she does it. In one story a woman allows an air conditioner to fall seventeen stories and flatten a…
There's comedy in Gish Jen's Typical American, comedy tempered in wry and refreshing ways. It's the story of a big-eared, bumbling Chinese boy who makes his way in America almost in spite of himself: unassimilated and adrift in an indifferent Manhattan, he is rescued by a long-lost sister, gets a Ph.D. in engineering, and then…
Kazuo Ishiguro's justifiably acclaimed novel, The Remains of the Day, has been considered unique due to the fact that the writer, a Japanese who grew up in England, has demonstrated his brilliance in projecting his imagination into the mental habits of a British butler, Stevens, who serves in the household of Lord Darlington. Stevens' language…
No products in the cart.