Tag: Dave Fitzgerald

  • Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    It’s sometimes disturbing to think about the ways in which traditions evolve. Nothing, after all, starts out as a tradition. The word, by definition, carries in it the implicit understanding that an idea or act has happened a number of times, across a lengthy period, with some level of sustained intentionality. Human civilization functions around,…

  • The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    There is a passage in what I have come to think of as, gun to my head, my all-time favorite novel—Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—wherein a character complains to his therapist that he thinks he might be going mad, only to be met with the following response: “No Leland, not you. You, and in…

  • David Leo Rice’s New Novel The New House, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    David Leo Rice’s New Novel The New House, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    My wife and I still talk often about the term “art monster”—first coined in Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, and introduced to us via Claire Dederer’s 2017 Paris Review article “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” (we don’t exactly have our fingers on the pulse, my wife and I).…

  • What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    What Are You, a new novel by Lindsay Lerman, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    In some ways, this feels like the book I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I have been calling myself a feminist since I was a but a shy, sheltered 16-year-old, diving headlong into Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, and Inga Muscio to impress my first girlfriend while my friends were mostly still reading…

  • Terminal Park, a novel by Gary J. Shipley, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    Terminal Park, a novel by Gary J. Shipley, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    How do you write about the meaning behind a book whose core subject is essentially the end of meaning? How do you encapsulate a book that struggles to contain itself? That churns, and roils, and seeps off of every page until its typeface is practically crawling up your arms and invading your orifices like the…

  • Dave Fitzgerald on Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell

    Dave Fitzgerald on Jared Joseph’s A Book About Myself Called Hell

    One of the first things I did after the initial wave of COVID-19 sent me and my 10,000 some-odd coworkers at the gargantuan state university where I work scurrying home for almost five months of quarantine, was pull The Brothers Karamazov down off my bookshelf—one of those dauntingly hefty classics that I’d always meant to…

  • Dave Fitzgerlad Reviews Amygdalatropolis, a novel by B.R. Yeager

    Dave Fitzgerlad Reviews Amygdalatropolis, a novel by B.R. Yeager

    For the first few pages, I thought B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis was some kind of cyberpunk dystopia. Its protagonist, /1404er/, exists in a hermetic, digital world populated entirely by other formless entities who share the name /1404er/, and his interactions therein revolve entirely around the sharing and discussion (and eventually, creation) of only the absolute ugliest,…

  • ANGEL HOUSE, a novel by David Leo Rice, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    ANGEL HOUSE, a novel by David Leo Rice, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    ANGEL HOUSE is the kind of novel that will mean something different to everyone who reads it, and indeed, will likely mean something different to me if I read it again in a few years, and yet again if I read it a third time somewhere down the line (all distinct possibilities). Because of this, I’ll go ahead…