Category: Reviews & Criticism
-
Mike Meginnis: Four Books I Gave as Gifts in 2012, and One I Received
I don’t know what the best books were this year. Mostly I don’t like to read things right after they come out, when people on the Internet and in the magazines are talking about how great they are. This is partly because most of the time I don’t really agree with most of my friends…
-
Colette Arrand Reviews The King of New Orleans: How the Junkyard Dog Became Professional Wrestling’s First Black Superhero
The King of New Orleans advertises itself as the story of how Sylvester Ritter, the professional wrestler better known as the Junkyard Dog, became wrestling’s first black superhero, but the thus-far definitive document on the former star is scant on biographical detail and long on attendance figures and gate receipts. Author Greg Klein, a journalist…
-
edward j rathke Reviews Water, a novel by J.A. Tyler,
J.A. Tyler’s Water is not a dream. It is two dreams. A dream of rain and a dream of fire. A prayer for land and a hunt for water. It is a dozen children gathered together, telling stories, finding worlds within one another, waiting for the rain to stop if only for a moment. It…
-
Jordan Sanderson Review: Thunderbird, poetry by Dorothea Lasky
The poems in Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbird have two faces: “One side [is] normal,” but “[t]he other side [is] cut into, so that the muscle flap[s].” The collection navigates a number of dialectics, including beauty and ugliness, air and flesh, understanding and misunderstanding, speech and silence, love and hate, hope and despair, the cerebral and the…
-
Ryan Werner Reviews The Law of Strings, stories by Steven Gillis
As I am an idiot, it’s unsurprising that I was not the speaker at my college graduation. I was nominated but ended up being runner-up, blew it in the final interview stages when I was asked what I learned from my non-liberal arts classes—math and science, specifically—and replied, “I learned how to write about torture.”…
-
A Review of The Way We Sleep, a multi-genre anthology edited by C. James Bye & Jessa Bye, reviewed by edward j rathke
Anthologies, to me, often run into the same problems that short-story collections tend to fall into: monotony. When stories are linked stylistically or thematically or by content, they tend to wear me out. A great story becomes mediocre when it is stuck between stories too similar in tone or style or content to allow it…
-
A Review of Gabriel Blackwell’s Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer by Joseph Riippi
Transcriber’s Note: What follows is, I think, a better review of Gabriel Blackwell’s Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer than I could ever have written on my own. I travel for business, you see. Just in the past week I’ve been to Atlanta, San Antonio, and Los Angeles, with quick trips back to…
-
Review: Louise Henrich on Beside the Sea, a novel by Véronique Olmi (Translated by Adriana Hunter)
When I fall in love with characters, I’ll finish the book and wish that they would stick around, and oftentimes, they do. Of course, there have been times I did not want a book to close because the ending provided did not fulfill my expectations. Beside the Sea brought to focus a third reason to…
-
“What Has Four Legs and Loves You?”: Will Kaufman Reviews George Singleton’s Stray Decorum
A man with more education than he initially seems to have, who has flirted with academia and/or the arts. A woman who is wrong for him, and probably at least a little crazy. A stranger or near-stranger, maybe a little bit of a con-man, and most certainly a liar. A dog that is ultimately more…
Heavy Feather Review 