Tag Archives: spring 2011

RIGHT OF WAY

Andrew Wingfield Washington Writers Publishing House ($16.95) by Zach Czaia Right of Way is fiction with an argument. Resisting the nomadic, rootless nature of much of contemporary American life, author Andrew Wingfield has written a series of stories about one fictional D.C. neighborhood, Cleave Springs. The first story, told by a one-time “hyena” of Capitol Hill […]

THE PERFUME RIVER: An Anthology of Writing from Vietnam

Edited by Catherine Cole University of Western Australia Press ($32.95) by Steve Street This fat anthology of short stories, hybrid narratives, and poems offers an array of perspectives on contemporary Vietnamese experience—including experiences beyond Vietnam’s borders and within them by non-Vietnamese. The central focusing event, even when unmentioned, is unavoidably what’s called “The American War,” […]

THE BRADSHAW VARIATIONS

Rachel Cusk Picador ($15) by Joshua Willey The seventh novel from Whitbread winner Rachel Cusk is in many ways the epitome of a minor work. It examines mediocre characters living mediocre lives, constructing around them a narrative structurally analogous to such content: muted, conservative, quiet. What makes it not only Cusk’s best work to date […]

THE SIXTY-FIVE YEARS OF WASHINGTON

Juan José Saer translated by Steve Dolph Open Letter ($14.95) by Scott Bryan Wilson Angel Leto and an acquaintance named The Mathematician—who, deeply tanned and always dressed in all white, “seems less like a flesh and bone person than one of those archetypes you see on billboards, those for whom every contingency inherent to humanity […]

THE EDEN HUNTER

Skip Horack Counterpoint ($15.95) by Billy Reynolds Reading a novel whose protagonist is a pygmy tribesman captured and sold into slavery (and whose canines and incisors have been filed into sharp points), you might become too conscious of the hero’s “otherness.” But this is not the case in Skip Horack’s first novel, The Eden Hunter. Horack, […]

THE COMPANY OF HEAVEN: Stories from Haiti

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell University of Iowa Press ($16) by Lauren E. Tyrrell Books based on calamities frequently gain quick popularity with their topical subjects, such as Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun on Hurricane Katrina. The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti, however, reminds readers of a country that struggled with fear and poverty long before its recent serial disasters of earthquake, […]

UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

Alissa Nutting Starcherone Books ($18) by Peter Grandbois Rarely does a reader experience an imagination pulsing with the vibrancy of Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Her bizarre stories inhabit the slipstream between literary fiction and science fiction, between fantasy and the fairy tale, all the while creating worlds where anything seems possible: “The […]

SONG OF THE ORANGE MOONS

Lori Ann Stephens Blooming Tree Press ($23.95) by Kristin Thiel The mark of a well-written book is layers: “It sounded good, but there was a threat behind her words.” To be clear, after a quotation such as that, Song of the Orange Moons is not a thriller—except in the way that all coming-of-age stories are scary and […]

THE PASSION ARTIST

John Hawkes Dalkey Archive ($13.95) by Greg Gerke Has there ever been a literary novel as saturated in sex and bodily fluids as John Hawkes’s The Passion Artist? Dalkey Archive’s recent reissue of this hypnotic work, first published in 1979, gives readers the chance to marvel at Hawkes’s unique blend of language and nightmares. The raw, […]

FALLING IN

Frances O'Roark Dowell Atheneum ($16.99) by Carrie Mercer “Quiet girls who weren't shy, girls who talked in riddles but were never actually rude”—such is the group of girls to which Isabelle Bean belongs. Isabelle makes the other middle school students roll their eyes, and the teachers throw up their hands. She's quirky. She doesn't exactly […]