Built in a Day, a novel by Steven Rinehart: The hero of this ambitious and smart debut novel, following on the heels of the story collection Kick in the Head, is a deceptively dangerous thirty-something dropout who is not above sleeping with his dead wife’s dead son’s teenaged girlfriend. Ultimately, this relentlessly entertaining story demonstrates…
The Caprices Short stories by Sabina Murray. Mariner Books, $13.00 paper. Reviewed by Debra Spark. The Caprices, Sabina Murray’s ambitious debut collection of stories, largely concerns the lives of men and women in the Far East in the early forties, which is to say, those who were affected by World War II, either by being…
Dangerous Men Stories by Geoffrey Becker. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. For fifteen years, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has been awarded to a first book of stories by an enormously talented writer, and this year’s selection, Dangerous Men by Geoffrey Becker, is no exception. Marked by precise and evocative language…
she didn ‘t mean to do it Poems by Daisy Fried. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. The poems in Daisy Fried’s first collection of poetry, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage…
Cathedral of the North Poems by Connie Voisine. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel. Connie Voisine’s Cathedral of the North is an intriguing account of the working poor of Maine, a place where the speaker’s “yard blooms with refrigerators and cars inside out and rusting.” Like Carolyn Chute’s earlier novels, Voisine’s…
Fields of Light A memoir by Joseph Hurka. Pushcart Press, $24.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In this debut book of nonfiction, American Joseph Hurka, son of a Czech anti-Communist resistance fighter, offers a generous, kind, and thoughtful memoir about his desire to inhabit his father Josef’s past, and thereby give both of them a…
Full Moon Boat Poems by Fred Marchant. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Its title and first poem proclaim Fred Marchant’s fine Full Moon Boat an odyssey inverted, defining an alternative to the ideal of the heroic return from war. Pressure from the family to adopt the martial model comes early, an…
Come Up and See Me Sometime Short stories by Erika Krouse. Scribner, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Debra Spark. Mae West provides the title for Erika Krouse’s debut book, Come Up and See Me Sometime, and also the epigraphs for the collection’s thirteen stories. But the bawdy self-confidence of Mae West (“I’m single because I was…
Oubliette Poems by Peter Richards. Verse Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. If you are a poet of any seriousness, you make a style for yourself out of one essential contradiction: the “thinginess” of experience, of thinking and feeling, and especially of silence, can’t be captured by words. The most distinctive stylists of the…
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