Elijah Visible Stories by Thane Rosenbaum. St. Martin’s Press, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Marcie Hershman. This is as vibrant and provocative a collection of short fiction as I’ve read in years. That it is also a debut collection makes it all the more gratifying. Thane Rosenbaum, who, in his early thirties left a prestigious New…
This first novel is neither polished and gemlike nor gusty and pungent, nor funny, nor exceptionally brilliant, nor prophetic in its earnestly Mailerian effort to place third world pain, protest, and pioneering into philosophical, historical and literary perspective, but the book has other solid virtues, worth the reader's patience to absorb. The time is the…
Emerald City Stories by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jodee Stanley. In the title story of Jennifer Egan’s collection, Emerald City, a young photographer’s assistant walks down the streets of Manhattan with his girlfriend, an unsuccessful model. He takes in the street noise, the dark storefronts, looking for something that…
Equal Love Stories by Peter Ho Davies. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Michael Byers. In Peter Ho Davies’s second collection, Equal Love, common domestic situations give rise, in unexpected ways, to moments of luminous reflection. Davies’s stories are allusive, mysterious, often funny, and tender. As in his debut collection, The Ugliest House in…
Farewell, My Lovelies Poems by Diann Blakely. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel. In her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, Diann Blakely evokes Raymond Chandler’s yin and writes a decidedly female poetry — tough, stylized, and heart-smart. In the opening poem of the collection, “Last Dance,” the speaker observes a gaggle of…
First, Body Stories by Melanie Rae Thon. Houghton Mifflin, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Christopher Tilghman. Melanie Rae Thon’s fierce, unyielding, and brilliant new stories are now collected in First, Body, and the effect of reading all of them together after seeing many of them when originally published is simply to encounter genius. These stories come…
. . .is a first novel, or first book, rather, full of good stuff, shaped loosely and roughly in the form of therapeutic reminiscence. There's a Writer at work in it, experimenting with styles, working for concision, profundity, and no-bullshit meatiness; now and then showing humor and relaxed gusto, now and then waxing into a…
Folks Like Me Poems by Sam Cornish. Zoland Books, $12.95 cloth. Reviewed by Sven Birkerts. Sam Cornish has written a book that subtly defies the norms. This is not a gathering of “poems,” or a showcase for isolated tours de force, but rather an ambitious vocal collage in which each poem is a voice and…
Blue Spruce Stories by David Long. Scribner, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. The twelve stories in David Long’s third collection, Blue Spruce, are distinctive for many reasons, but mostly they are marked by place — namely, Montana and other points Northwest. Restless, lonely, the people in Long’s stories are inheritors of the American West,…
No products in the cart.