Tag: Dave Fitzgerald

Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Jess Hagemann’s Documentarian Novel Mother-Eating

Back when I was growing up—a good, Christian boy in the suburban South—there were pretty much three cults that everyone knew by place or name: Waco, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate. That was the list. Sure, our parents would decry large-scale organizations like Scientology and Mormonism as cults, but (fair or not) that was largely denigratory,…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Jesi Bender’s New Novel Child of Light

“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s probably safe to presume that anyone reading this site with any regularity knows this line by heart. As the first of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, it sits comfortably close to the top of the ranks for most famous first lines in…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Stefan O. Rak’s Paranoic Novel New Roses

Paranoia is a tricky beast to capture. I think we can all recognize and relate to it from the outside easily enough, whether in the wild-eyed monologuing of Macbeth and Raskolnikov or the slow-burn panic of classic alienation thrillers like The Conversation and The Parallax View, or the countless ongoing explorations of our evolving surveillance…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joe Koch’s Story Collection Invaginies

Over the past few years, as I’ve delved further into indie and experimental literature and been exposed to the dazzling array of queer writers thriving therein, I’ve discovered something of a bad habit in myself—a tendency to automatically read as-yet-unidentified narrators as the same gender as their authors. I’ve been caught with my comprehensive pants…
“Some Kind of Monster”: Stephen Meisel Reads Dave Fitzgerald’s Novel Troll

The trashed halls of pop culture are littered with Slenderman copypastas taken to horrific conclusions and jokes turned into career-threatening scandals. Yes, it’s true. These days, we have a lot of trouble figuring out just how seriously we should take anything—anything at all. Enter Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll, an encyclopedia of cringe, the novel no one…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Joel Death, a novel by B.R. Yeager with illustrations by John Trefry

I love Billy Joel. I will not apologize, for I do not feel shame. When it comes to Billy Joel, I am shameless. I love his attic songs and his streetlife serenades; I love his cold spring harbors and his Summer highland falls. I love him from Oyster Bay Long Island to Soviet Leningrad to…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads K Hank Jost’s MadStone

There are a lot of different ways of being poor, and I have tried out several. I don’t want to oversell it. I’ve never lived on the street or anything. I’ve always had a safety net—parents who love me, and wouldn’t let me fall off the map without a fight—but there were definitely years when…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Elle Nash’s Deliver Me

We teach people how to treat us. I don’t remember exactly where I first heard this little nugget of pop psychological wisdom, but it’s remained one of my most contemplated, and shared pieces of advice ever since. It sounds so simple, but for many people, myself included, it’s a truism that bears regular reminding. Though…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald Reads Agustin Maes’ Newborn

“It’s about a dead baby.” This is what author Agustin Maes will reliably answer if you ask him about his book Newborn. Soft-spoken, and humble nearly to the point of bashfulness (this despite being a runner-up for the Paris Literary Prize his first time out the gate), he doesn’t always seem to grasp the weight…