Category: Reviews & Criticism

  • Lake of Earth, prose by William VanDenBerg, reviewed by David Peak

    Lake of Earth, prose by William VanDenBerg, reviewed by David Peak

    The cover image of Lake of Earth shows a gemstone—its surface angled, smooth, brilliant—that seems to contain an inner light, something Machen might have imagined as harboring a human soul. This gemstone can also be seen as being representative of VanDenBerg’s crystal-clear, lean prose. Take, for example, this brief excerpt from the story “Wife of…

  • Book Review: m. forajter on Nicole Wilson’s Poetry Collection Supper & Repair Kit

    Book Review: m. forajter on Nicole Wilson’s Poetry Collection Supper & Repair Kit

    What is a body? A person? How do we form identities when we exist in bodies we didn’t choose? How do we live when our identities clash so painfully with what the world expects us to be? How do we live when things continually happen to us? Both a reflection of body and of the…

  • Tribute, a fragmentary narrative by Anne Germanacos, reviewed by Bayard Godsave

    Tribute, a fragmentary narrative by Anne Germanacos, reviewed by Bayard Godsave

    There is a certain type of writing which asks us to engage with it so that the reader must become an active participant. The reader gives over and becomes writer as well. Call it a kind of collaborative reading, or call it, as Roland Barthes did, a writerly text. Tribute by Anne Germanacos is the…

  • Motherfucking Sharks, a novel by Brian Allen Carr, reviewed by Brett Beach

    Motherfucking Sharks, a novel by Brian Allen Carr, reviewed by Brett Beach

    A stranger comes to town. We know this story, don’t we? He warns of approaching danger, which the townspeople ignore. And because we are familiar with this story, we know the tale will not have a happy ending for most. The stranger—crazy or haunted, ill and raving—is right. Brian Allen Carr’s Motherfucking Sharks is a…

  • Commercial Fiction, stories by Dave Housley, reviewed by Nicholas Grider

    Commercial Fiction, stories by Dave Housley, reviewed by Nicholas Grider

    Dave Housley’s Commercial Fiction is exactly what the title suggests, in two senses of the term. First, it’s literally short fiction that curls itself around standard network TV commercials, with anything from Taco Bell to Cialis given the brief 3D space of psychologically complex characters, many of whom, beneath the plywood façade of the commercial,…

  • Praying Drunk, stories by Kyle Minor, reviewed by Jeremy Hauck

    Praying Drunk, stories by Kyle Minor, reviewed by Jeremy Hauck

    In Praying Drunk, his second book following In the Devil’s Territory (Dzanc Books, 2008), Kyle Minor forays beyond the realm of literary realist fiction and into conceptual work even as he makes hay from the material that literary fiction has monopolized: suicide, cancer/terminal illness, lives changed irrevocably by events lasting only seconds, travel to the…

  • Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck, rejection letters by Lee Klein, reviewed by Nichole L. Reber

    Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck, rejection letters by Lee Klein, reviewed by Nichole L. Reber

    Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck collects a decade’s worth of pithy, humorous rejection letters sent to writers who hoped to publish in Lee Klein’s self-proclaimed “semi-literary” online journal, Eyeshot. This is not the stuff of “We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but we’ve decided not to publish …” No, these rejections are…

  • Housebound, a novel by Elizabeth Gentry, reviewed by Louise Henrich

    Housebound, a novel by Elizabeth Gentry, reviewed by Louise Henrich

    Elizabeth Gentry’s Housebound crystallizes a moment of irrevocable change within a family. When Housebound opens, Maggie, the eldest daughter in a large, sheltered family, decides to leave her family home to search for work in the city: Leaving home felt like tunneling out of a snow that had kept everyone housebound so long they had…

  • In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place, stories by Jessica Hollander, reviewed by Nick Kocz

    In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place, stories by Jessica Hollander, reviewed by Nick Kocz

    I’ve heard it said that the purpose of the first few pages of a novel is to teach the reader how to read the novel. Short story collections, understandably, operate a little differently, yet in the opening sentence of Jessica Hollander’s In These Times the Home is a Tired Place, the lyrical short story collection…