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 Jacqueline Winter Thomas | Feb 23, 2014
Former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli’s Winter is a wisdom text. Wisdom, canonically one of the four cardinal virtues, is defined as the possession or seeking of knowledge, and requires the control or tempering of one’s emotions so that reason...
by Kay Cosgrove | Feb 16, 2014
When one picks up Matthew Lippman’s new collection, American Chew, the inevitable question surfaces: what is ‘American’ about American Chew? Divided into two parts, this collection takes on, without hesitation, issues of race, gender, sexuality and politics;...
by Will Donnelly | Feb 7, 2014
Laurent Binet’s HHhH follows Operation Anthropoid, the Allied plot to assassinate SS-Obergrüppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich by Slovak warrant officer Jozef Gabčík and Czech staff sergeant Jan Kubiš. The assassination succeeded, if not exactly as planned, though...
by Lauren Hilger | Jan 31, 2014
I’m no spark plug, but I know my arms bleed strength, and atrophy with every pleasure. Forget pleasure. Let me hang unlit light-strings in the trees, give me a plastic chair to sit myself down in, and let the roof deck lift me up in sundown’s sun, give me the only...
by Joseph Scapellato | Jan 23, 2014
Last semester I used Brian Shawver’s The Language of Fiction as the craft book backbone for the fiction unit of an introductory multi-genre creative writing course. Selecting it was a bit of a gamble (I’ll be honest: I’d only read a few chapters), though I had...
