Aside from that of Edmund Wilson, Islands in the Stream has met with little intelligent criticism. Now that the novel is out in paperback a few words might advertise the book's importance. There is no question that Hemingway's eminence has diminished in the years following A Moveable Feast. Many are now repulsed by his personality,…
It is easy in one way to review Thomas Lux's Memory's Handgrenade because the book is such a pleasure to read and re-read. It is also easy to be misled: one keeps hearing other voices in his work. There is W.S. Merwin, with whom Lux shares a concern for subjects like gloves (Merwin: "gloves of…
Jimmy & Rita Poems by Kim Addonizio. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Whitman’s famous proclamation “Through me the many long dumb voices,” depending on how it strikes the ear, echoes either with self-aggrandizement, a song that appropriates everything within shouting distance to swell its own puny notes, or with self-erasure,…
Mercy Seat Poems by Bruce Smith. Univ. of Chicago, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. In the epigraph to a poem called “Self-Portrait as Ornette Coleman,” Bruce Smith quotes the legendary saxophonist as saying of Spike Jones’s treatment of an old standard, “He’d take ‘Stardust’ and run a saw through it then come back…
"Novel" seems somehow the wrong term to apply to Francine Prose's first book; and "first novel" seems even more unfortunate, connoting as it so often does, grandness of purpose and lack of artistic control. Rather, Judah The Pious is a tale, a story within a story, almost a legend. The writer's art lies in the…
The coming-of-age story has become a somewhat tedious genre in recent years, owing simply, perhaps, to the sheer proliferation of them — and attenuated further, no doubt, by Hollywood — but Melanie Rae Thon transcends the easy traps of the form in Meteors in August, producing a fine first novel distinguished by its lyrical resonance….
Kick in the Head Stories by Steven Rinehart. Doubleday, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Steven Rinehart’s debut collection of stories, Kick in the Head, presents an ensemble of characters pushed through the edge to an abominable and shocking other side, while at the same time giving us tales that are always magnetic, entertaining, and…
How Aliens Think Stories by Judith Grossman. The Johns Hopkins University Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first story collection, Judith Grossman, author of the acclaimed 1988 novel Her Own Terms, is boldly and decisively all over the map. How Aliens Think consists of lively and intelligent stories that are sometimes metafictional,…
"The visible points to the invisible," writes Sarah Appleton in Ladder of the World's Joy. This is the basic statement, the ars poetica, of a writer for whom every thing means more than itself. In an explanatory note at the end, Sarah Appleton recounts her indebtedness to Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, which…
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