The Vine That Ate the South – J.D. Wilkes
THE VINE THAT ATE THE SOUTH is more conversion narrative than odyssey, and more tall tale than either, filled with a twisty, tongue-in-cheek lyricism that calls to mind a Weird Twain.
Family, Genus, Species – Kevin Allardice
Allardice’s deft novel is deceptively complex, layered not simply with satire, but with emotional revelations about family, community, sexuality, parenthood, race, and class
Heavens on Earth – Carmen Boullosa
Language is as much for sharing, being together, as it is for suppressing, delegitimizing.
Beitelman is a kind of kinder Carver.
The Great American Songbook – Sam Allingham
What Allingham shows is that songs are most effective when their writers embrace the limitations their medium presents, and cannily exploit these to draw attention to their project’s artifice.
To Love the Coming End – Leanne Dunic
This Japan is pedestrian and epic, lyric and prosaic, like so much of the book.
Art about failure, about idiocy — which so much of our art today is — always seems to have this same sense of disingenuousness about it.
Transplanting, mirroring, translation — each conserves some part of the original, even if some other part is lost.
I keep wondering what it means for a city to be no-place. What it means to make home out of no-place.
Beyond the Blurb – Daniel Green
The divide between the top capos of Big 5 publishing and the assistants that execute their bidding is more vast and unscalable than ever before.