One of the early stories in Aubrey Hirsch’s collection Why We Never Talk About Sugar (Braddock Avenue Books 2013) begins with, “Right from the start, Cris was pretty certain she could get me pregnant.” It’s an ambitious first line, one that is both intriguing and bizarre. While the story’s introduction seems odd (let alone physically …
Electrico W Herve le Tellier Other Books, 2013 Writing about love inadvertently teeters on the edge of cliché. Typically, the subject is treated as a plot-point, a simple development for the many romance movies that spring up every summer. Herve Le Tellier’s Electrico W (Other Books 2013) is a resounding rebuke to this formula. In …
Any Deadly Thing by Roy Kesey From its first lines, Kesey’s collection paints an unforgiving, even cruel, portrait of the world. A father attempts to cut his daughter’s hair. She screams, he grabs her, she bites him and runs off. As an opening sequence, it’s far from inviting, but Kesey’s keen sense of immediacy gives …
The circus is a place of both wonder and terror; the audience is simultaneously amazed and frightened by the performances. We hold our breath while the trapeze artist flips through the air and gasp in amazement when the lion tamer sticks his head in his beast’s mouth. In the circus, humans can fly, and animals …
The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon Bellevue Literary Press 2012 The line between fiction and nonfiction is strangely, sometimes frustratingly, blurred in Eduardo Halfon’s newest book, The Polish Boxer. The novel begins in a Guatemalan college classroom with a narrator also named Eduardo Halfon. This presumably fictionalized characterization of the author is the narrator for …
Something is rotten in the city of Bohane. From the lines of hoor houses and dream pipe saloons in Smoketown to the bloodthirsty Cusacks in the Northside Rises to the head of the Hartnett Fancy, Logan Hartnett himself, brooding with his wife Macu in his Beauvista manse—it is troubled times in Bohane when Kevin Barry’s …
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov While it can be relaxing to read a book that doesn’t require a tableside dictionary, often more challenging books allow a reader to engage fully with the text, even if we feel that the author is trying to parse out uncommitted readers. Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real …
Baseball has been a fixation in all aspects of American culture, perhaps most potently in literature. There is something deeply poetic about the stop-and-go momentum of baseball games and the romanticized innocence of childhood that comes with it. Matthew Pitt, in his collection’s title story, essentially bucks any of this childish romanticism. The story is …