Book Review

rev. of The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Louie

The Barbarians Are Coming A novel by David Wong Louie. Putnam, $23.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Sterling Lung has problems. The narrator of David Wong Louie’s first novel, The Barbarians Are Coming, is a recent graduate of the CIA — the Culinary Institute of America — and he has landed what he regards as…

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rev. of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

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…

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rev. of The Best of the West #4 an anthology edited by James and Denise Thomas

The West is a place of myth, legend, and genre. "Call it a geography of the heart — a geological survey of western literary imagination," write the editors. The stories in this collection were chosen not necessarily because they are from and about the region, but because they follow a tradition in theme and setting,…

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rev. of The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 by Jack Gilbert

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…

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rev. of The Blue Hour by Elizabeth Evans

The Blue Hour A novel by Elizabeth Evans. Algonquin Books, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Janet Desaulniers. In Elizabeth Evans’s first novel, The Blue Hour, the narrator, Penny, recounts her teenaged years with both a child’s twitchy, anticipatory dread of the future and an adult’s sorrowful knowledge of the past. The book peels away the decorous…

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rev. of The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore

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…

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rev. of The Broken World by Marcus Cafagña

The Broken World Poems by Marcus Cafagña. Univ. of Illinois Press, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff. The inhabitants of Marcus Cafagña’s broken world beat against the bars of circumstance and fate as the poet fixes them with the empathy of attention. Whether in the kid shooting baskets who’s “had it / with the…

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rev. of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf Poems by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. It is obvious from the first poem in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s debut book of poetry in English that her concerns will be large: “while my grandfather, a prisoner of war / in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned / booties…

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rev. of The Carnation by Paul Hannigan

In "A Microtome," Paul Hannigan suggests "naming each orgasm after a famous magician." Sleight-of-hand seems to me the key to the poems in The Carnation: sometimes the drone of conversation or the montony of the mind just rambling is inexplicably transformed into vision — clear, hard, wrought vision; sometimes a sort of camp nonchalance or…

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