Book Review

  • Review: Train Dreams

    Denis Johnson’s new novella, Train Dreams—a brilliantly imagined elegy to the lost wilderness of the early 20th-century Idaho Panhandle and the “hard people of the northwest mountains” who occupied it—focuses on the life story of one such hard person, Robert Grainier. The novella opens in 1917 as Grainier, part of a railroad bridge-building crew, is…

  • Review: A Disobedient Girl

    “She loved fine things and she had no doubt that she deserved them. That is why it had not felt like stealing.” From taking cakes of Lux rose-scented soap from the bathroom cabinet to committing far more serious crimes, the two women in Ru Freeman’s stunning debut novel have disobeyed. The first is Latha, the…

  • Review: How Like Foreign Objects

    At 113 pages, How Like Foreign Objects is an ambitious and meaty first book, filled with poetry that is succinct and captivating. It is easy to be hooked by Orgera’s quick wit and deceptively straightforward syntax. Especially, as in “Sleeping with the Dictionary,” when she presents lines that offer immediate pleasure while pointing to a…

  • Review: Tocqueville

    Khaled Mattawa’s fourth book marks his second breakthrough (his first was his debut, Ismalia Eclipse). The title poem, and centerpiece, is a 26 page visionary reorientation in verse of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Mattawa’s Tocqueville is not a mere revision of that historical document, but a poetry based on motion, where narrative doesn’t…

  • Review: Say Her Name

    “No quiero morir. I don’t want to die. That may have been the last full sentence she ever spoke, maybe her very last words,” writes Francisco Goldman of his late wife Aura Estrada in his novel Say Her Name. A fiction writer and doctoral student at Columbia, Aura was just thirty when she died in…

  • Review: The Inverted Forest

    Dalton’s second novel begins: “A night breeze lifted the dark skirts of the forest.” This sensuous image escorts us into Kindermann Forest Summer Camp in rural Missouri. Here, all the camp counselors are skinny-dipping. We soon learn that elderly Schuller Kindermann will have none of this at his camp. Out they go, in come replacements:…