Tag: Zachary Kocanda

This Rancid Mill, an Alex Damage novel by Kyle Decker, reviewed by Zachary Kocanda

The main character of Kyle Decker’s novel This Rancid Mill doesn’t fit the bill of a typical detective. Maybe it’s the three-inch-high blue mohawk. Or the Dead Kennedys patch on his leather jacket. Or the one-liners like: “It took me the span of a Dee Dee Ramone count-off to decide she was my kind of…
Zachary Kocanda Reviews Kevin Maloney’s Novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim

How far would you go to live the life you imagined for yourself when you were young and anything was possible? To avoid working for your dad’s friend’s company for the rest of your life and hating yourself? Kevin Maloney’s new novel, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, chronicles the misadventures of the titular man-child—also named Kevin Maloney—on…
Give It to the Grand Canyon, a novel by Noah Cicero, reviewed by Zachary Kocanda

The novelist Nelson Algren was called a “bard of the down-and-outer,” a writer whose characters were people ignored by literature. Noah Cicero’s new novel Give It to the Grand Canyon continues this storytelling tradition by recording the deeds of the down-and-outers who scoop ice cream for tourists in the Arizona desert during the summer. In…
Zachary Kocanda on Ryan Werner’s Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, a book of one sentence album reviews

I was introduced to Ryan Werner’s work when I read and reviewed his novella Soft (Passenger Side Books, 2015) a few years ago. The novella is composed of two hundred fifty-eight micro-chapters, some as short as one sentence, so it made sense that for his new book, Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, Werner decided to…
Book Review: Zachary Kocanda on Chelsea Martin’s Novella Mickey

The epigraph for Chelsea Martin’s novella Mickey is a lyric from the song “3 AM” by Matchbox 20: “It’s all gonna end and it might as well be my fault.” It’s an appropriate introduction because pages later, the narrator breaks up with her boyfriend, the titular Mickey. Yet this VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the…
Review: Zachary Kocanda on Amateurs, a novel by Dylan Hicks

Amateurs, the sophomore novel by Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter and novelist Dylan Hicks, is about the consequences of shooting for the moon—or at least the New York Times Best Sellers list. A twenty-first-century novel of manners in the Austenian tradition, Amateurs spans the mid-to-late aughts, and after a short prologue, its sections are structured as prenuptial and…
Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda Reads Gwen Beatty’s Kill Us on the Way Home

We read fiction to be who we’re not, if only for a few pages. And we don’t only do this when we read fiction. We do this, for example, when we pretend to be pregnant to befriend our Mormon ex-boyfriend’s wife. Or this is what one character does in “The Most Important Part of Being…
Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda Reads Softby Ryan Werner

There’s not much to writing rock and roll music. A popular quote says all you need is three chords and the truth. Researching this quote, I learned that it was about country music (from Harlan Howard), but it applies to rock and roll, too. In fact, Lou Reed said one chord was fine, and two…
Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda on Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France by Bryan Hurt

Not too long ago, I read of a city in France that installed short story dispensers, a reason to travel to the country even if one is not, say, the ambassador to the country, a career I had not considered before reading Bryan Hurt’s debut collection. Thankfully, readers do not have to use a short…