by Marcus Pactor | Feb 20, 2015
Huck Finn’s tall shadow tints every American novel. Some writers ignore it as best they can. Others offer obeisance when called upon. But few writers will engage the work directly. That is why readers who have loved Huck Finn at any age will want to check out Norman...
by Marcus Pactor | May 26, 2014
Amina Cain’s collection, Creature (Dorothy Project, 2013), owes great debts to the writing of Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector. Cain samples bits of their prose, and elsewhere mimics and tweaks their styles. Consider how Cain takes the stripped-down...
by Marcus Pactor | Mar 4, 2014
Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous (OR Books, 2013) is a luscious work of fiction. I am not sure if I can call it a novel. I am sure that I do not care whether it is or is not. The book is the product of a uniquely intelligent, elegant writer. It is full of...
by Marcus Pactor | Jan 8, 2014
The Desert Places offers a beautiful history of evil. It is as dark and violent as you expect, but roughly ten thousand books published in the last year were dark and violent. This work is distinguished by its construction. First, the collaborators (authors Robert...
by Marcus Pactor | Oct 17, 2013
Gabriel Blackwell is emerging as one of our great formal innovators. What Gary Lutz has been doing at the level of sentences and words, Blackwell is doing at the level of stories, essays, and novels. In his first novel, Shadow Man, he offered a verbal collage...
