A Four-Sided Bed A novel by Elizabeth Searle. Graywolf Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, A Four-Sided Bed, Elizabeth Searle, the 1992 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, ambitiously tackles the shifting boundaries of love and sexuality. Over the course of a telling year, two men and two women…
J.-M. G. Le Clézio and the Nobel Prize: This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature selection has proven controversial, and to some, disappointing. One French critic fumed that the winner’s fiction lacked "universality," and even worse, often made it to the bestseller lists. The dean of German literary critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, expressed astonishment that the award…
You might think that Michael Chabon is simply trying to twist your tongue when he writes sentences like this: "She had on one of those glittering, opalescent Intergalactic Amazon leotard-and-tights combinations that seem to be made of cavorite and adamantium and do not so much cling to a woman's body as seal her off from…
Exiles, a novel by Ron Hansen (FSG): While Ron Hansen’s forays into fiction have been so diverse as to seem disjointed—from the outlaws in Desperados and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, to Hitler and his twisted obsessions in Hitler’s Niece, to the young and unstable nun in Mariette in Ecstasy—all…
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Poems and prose by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Jan Heller Levi. W.W. Norton & Co., $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by M. L. Rosenthal. It is a delight to see Muriel Rukeyser in print again. Her intimately self-searching lyricism and her identification with the world’s insulted and injured have a special place in…
The Earth in the Attic, poems by Fady Joudah (Yale): Wallace Stevens wrote of the extraordinary pressure of news, how "the consciousness of the world" fixes on events that make "the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement of people in the intervals of a storm. " Fady Joudah’s debut collection explores both storms…
"We should contribute to the surprise of creation," a country pastor says during a sermon in one of Charles Baxter's stories, "by exercising charity." "Surprise" and "charity" — these two words suggest both the form and the theme of Charles Baxter's brilliant new collection, A Relative Stranger. The surprising always happens in these wonderful stories…
Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, an anthology on writing edited by Bret Anthony Johnston (Random House): Bret Anthony Johnston has turned over the deck and fanned his cards, face-up, across the table. "I don’t believe in talent," he writes. "Truth be told, I’m not at all sure that writing can be…
Without, a doubt, Absent Without Leave and Other Stories, Jessica Treadway's first book, is one of the most powerful debuts by an American writer in years. The ten stories in the collection are emotionally raw, unflinching in their honesty and generous in their depth. In another writer's hands, the situations presented here — often about…
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