Tag: Dan Townsend

  • Dan Townsend on Between Wrecks, new short fiction by George Singleton

    Dan Townsend on Between Wrecks, new short fiction by George Singleton

    I’ve read almost all of George Singleton’s books. His novel Workshirts for Madmen is the best thing I’ve read about overcoming addiction. His stories have been published everywhere. One time I sent him an e-mail telling him how great I thought he was. I’d been drinking. And yet Singleton gets the labels. He’s a regionalist.…

  • Travel Notes, an episodic novel by Stanley Crawford, reviewed by Dan Townsend

    Travel Notes, an episodic novel by Stanley Crawford, reviewed by Dan Townsend

    I. On the surface, Travel Notes by Stanley Crawford is glib satire, in line with Catch-22 or Vonnegut’s Slapstick. The novel is episodic, owing to the tradition of the farcical travelogue. Promotional materials compare the story to a “fever dream”. I’m not sure what that means, fortunate as I’ve been never to have had a fever…

  • Reckoning, a novel by Rusty Barnes, reviewed by Dan Townsend

    Reckoning, a novel by Rusty Barnes, reviewed by Dan Townsend

    Rusty Barnes’s first novel, Reckoning, is the story of Richard, a fourteen-year-old country boy, who finds a woman naked and left for dead in the woods. Through this woman, Misty, Richard accesses the dark side of the small farming town where he lives. Motivated by teenage curiosity, hormones, and a fragile sense of down-home morality,…

  • Infinity’s Jukebox, a fiction chapbook by Matthew Burnside, reviewed by Dan Townsend

    Infinity’s Jukebox, a fiction chapbook by Matthew Burnside, reviewed by Dan Townsend

    In an early lecture James Joyce said the “human mind, as it looks forward and backward, attains an eternal state … taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.” I don’t know if Matthew Burnside was thinking of Joyce when he titled his chapbook, but Infinity’s…