Tag: Dorothy
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Revenge of the Scapegoat, a satirical novel by Caren Beilin, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou
Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat begins and ends in a café in Philadelphia, where the protagonist, Iris, waits for her friend Ray. The two scenes are eerily similar, down to Iris’ outfits and the presence of flying insects around their table. And both sections open with a single, stand-alone sentence: “I was upset.” Iris’…
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“Stranger Territories”: Matthew Phipps Reviews Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest
The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George’s audaciously good debut collection of fiction, opens, significantly, on the occasion of a birthday. At the beginning of the first story, “Guidance / The Party,” the unnamed narrator, newly thirty-three, is visited by a figure she only knows as The Guide. Spectral and robed, of indeterminate gender, The Guide…
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“It Was Getting Dark Outside but I Didn’t Want to Stop Reading to Turn the Light On”: A Short Interview with Story Prize Judge Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco holds an MFA from Brown and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipses Press, 2009), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest; judged by Rikki Ducornet), Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (which won the FC2 Catherine…
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Book Review: John Brown Spiers on Vertigo, short stories by Joanna Walsh
Vertigo is the kind of book it’s easy to let yourself be fooled by. It is smaller than the average prose collection. It is shorter. It has a very low number of lines per page, something you might realize if you flip through it or glance at a screenshot. These facts will make an impression…
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“To Escape to Something Beyond the World”: Matt Weinkam Interviews Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco has been busy. In the last five years, she has written five books, including A Compendium of Domestic Incidents, which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith, which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize judged by Ben Marcus. She published stories in Conjunctions,…
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Review: Louise Henrich on Promising Young Women, fragmentary tales by Suzanne Scanlon
To verbalize what makes this book so wonderful is to do it an injustice, but I’ll try anyway. There have been many books and movies, some which were referenced, that have dealt with women who have been institutionalized, or have dealt with severe mental or emotional problems. Promising Young Women adds an ineffable quality to…
Heavy Feather Review 