-
Follow ZYZZYVA
-
-
-
-
-
Tag Archives: book review
‘Home Remedies’ by Xuan Juliana Wang: Perfect Worlds
“Family,” “Love,” and “Time and Space” comprise the three sections of Xuan Juliana Wang’s first story collection, Home Remedies (204 pages; Hogarth). These categories describe this book better than much else could: Wang conjures an incredibly wide range of characters and plotlines, all tied together through notions of familial bonds, love, and temporality. There are no broad strokes or homogenizing glances in Wang’s work. These stories, concerned with Chinese young people and their engagements with culture, curiosity, and identity are complicated and specific, personal and detailed, messy and absurd. Each story Wang creates is so perfectly and wholly its own …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, collection, fiction, home remedies, story collection, Xuan Juliana Wang
Leave a comment
‘The Churchgoer’ by Patrick Coleman: The Limits of Doubt
Even if Patrick Coleman’s first novel, The Churchgoer (354 pages; Harper Perennial), was not prefaced by a quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the story’s noir flavors would be unmistakable. Mark Haines, a former youth pastor turned burned-out security guard and amateur surfer, lost his faith and more than a step when his beloved sister committed suicide years ago. In his rearview are a wife and a teen daughter who can barely swallow their bile to speak to him on the phone every so often. Meanwhile, always close at hand is the alcohol addiction he fights to keep a …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, detective, fiction, harper perennial, noir, patrick coleman
Leave a comment
‘Stubborn Archivist’ by Yara Rodrigues Fowler: The Preciousness of a Moment
The task of organizing one’s life experiences into a comprehensible narrative is a universal one—why else do so many of us go to therapy? Through our internal dialogue we create stories, or perhaps allow ourselves to live according to the stories that best help us cope. This is a work of inclusion and omission, of unearthing and rearranging: But there were good times There were good times. Come on. Be honest with yourself. Yeah the sex had been good sometimes… And she had loved him… And there were other things. But she’s a stubborn archivist. Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s first novel, …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, Brazil, fiction, mariner books, novel, Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Leave a comment
‘Stay and Fight’ by Madeline ffitch: Living Off the Land
Building family in the face of capitalist-driven environmental collapse might look something like Madeline ffitch’s first novel, Stay and Fight (304 pages; FSG), at once indulging fantasies of reclusive living outside the gaze of the State, while simultaneously narrating the impossibility of such an existence. This is not to say Stay and Fight denies the prospect of, or human capacity for, crafting alternative, distinctly non-traditional ways of surviving. On the contrary, ffitch’s characters sustain themselves, maintain a home, and even raise a child, all miles outside the comforts and confines of urban or otherwise familiar civilization. And yet, even in …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, environmentalism, fiction, late capitalism, madeline ffitch, novel, stay and fight
Leave a comment
‘The Wind That Lays Waste’ by Selva Almada: A Long and Humid Afternoon
A devoted man of God and his sullen teenage daughter are on the road to a church in a remote village when their car breaks down. They soon find themselves at the mercy of a grizzled mechanic who has sworn off religion and runs a garage alongside his wide-eyed son. Though the setting may be Argentina, the setup for Selva Almada’s latest novel, The Wind That Lays Waste (124 pages; Graywolf Press; translated by Chris Andrews), feels as though it could be plucked from the pages of revered Southern author Flannery O’Connor. But while Almada shares some of O’Connor’s subject …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Argentina, book review, fiction, Flannery O'Connor, Graywolf Press, novel, novella, Selva Almada, translation
Leave a comment
‘Lanny’ by Max Porter: A Farewell to Childhood Innocence
In came the sound of a song, warm on his creaturely breath, and he snuggled up against me, climbing up on my lap, wrapping himself up around my neck. So begins Lanny (216 pages; Graywolf Press), the latest novel by Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Lanny takes place in a village outside of London, where there lives a being known as Dead Papa Toothwort—a formerly mythic figure among the townspeople, now reduced to a popular Halloween costume and a warning for schoolchildren. After napping for an indeterminate amount of time, Dead Papa Toothwort wakes at dusk …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, fiction, Graywolf Press, magical realism, Max Porter, novel
Leave a comment
‘The Paper Wasp’ by Lauren Acampora: Truer Than Life
It’s easy to conceive of the world of celebrity as a modern day pantheon, populated by figures as remote and untouchable as the gods. But how often we forget that those who fill the pages of Us Weekly are, in fact, people, too –– with family, old flames, and, yes, former classmates tucked away in their distant pasts. As Lauren Acampora’s first novel, A Paper Wasp (289 pages; Grove Press), opens, Abby travels to her ten-year high school reunion in Western Michigan in hopes of making contact with Elise, a former childhood companion now on her way to Hollywood stardom. …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, fiction, Grove Press, Hollywood, Lauren Acampora, mental illness, novel, the paper wasp
Leave a comment
‘As One Fire Consumes Another’ by John Sibley Williams: Each Poem a Sermon
The poems in John Sibley Williams’ latest book, As One Fire Consumes Another (82 pages; Orison Books), are verbs: they implore and demand, they connect and recall, they cry out and they quietly walk away. The collection, winner of the 2018 of the Orison Poetry Prize, maintains a generational sense of story — an understanding of family that is dense in time and broad in scope as it considers both the immediacy of human relationships and the distance of the natural world. Williams is as acutely focused on the wide arcs of historical violence and injustice as he is on …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged as one fire consumes another, book review, John Sibley Williams, orison books, poem, poet, Poetry
Leave a comment
‘Aug 9—Fog’ by Kathryn Scanlan: Glazing the Mundane with Meaning
Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9—Fog (128 pages; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is short and sweet — to be read in one afternoon, then reread many afternoons over. Existing somewhere between fiction, collage, and found poetry, Scanlan’s book is composed of sentences the author pulled from a stranger’s 1968 diary, which she won in an Illinois estate auction. As Scanlan’s authorial voice blends with that of the diary owner, the two meditate together on the passage of everyday life. While reading Aug 9—Fog, I was reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in the effortless way Scanlan glazes the mundane with meaning. Scanlan forms …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Aug 9—Fog, book review, collage, fiction, found poetry, fsg, Kathryn Scanlan, Poetry
Leave a comment
‘Open Me’ by Lisa Locascio: Self-Discovery in a Foreign Land
Open Me (275 pages; Grove Press), Lisa Locascio’s first novel just re-issued in paperback, is a politically charged and erotic story that fearlessly tackles race, xenophobia, and female sexuality. Immersed in the mind and body of a young woman living abroad in Denmark, the novel seethes with passionate descriptions of both sex and emotions. It shamelessly details something often hidden and rarely discussed—female sexuality in its rawest form. The narrator, Roxana Olsen, is an 18-year-old American girl spending her summer in Denmark — a summer meant to have seen her studying abroad in Paris with her best friend. However, a …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged book review, Denmark, fiction, Grove Press, Lisa Locascio, novel, Open Me
Leave a comment
‘People I’ve Met From the Internet’ by Stephen van Dyck: Delight in the Details
Stephen van Dyck’s People I’ve Met From the Internet (151 pages; Ricochet Editions) is the ultimate memoir for the Information Age: a series of extraordinarily personal vignettes derived from a data spreadsheet. The book spans 11 years and takes place in multiple states, mostly roaming the arid space between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, California. It reads like a grand road trip in the age of dial-up Internet. The book’s earliest pages take the form of a table divided into columns like “REAL NAME,” “SCREEN NAME AT THE TIME WE MET,” and “X=TIMES MET OR DAYS SPENT.” When starting …Continue reading
‘The Organs of Sense’ by Adam Ehrlich Sachs: The Pleasures of Misdirection
Gottfried Leibniz may have discovered calculus, but really he had the soul of a novelist. You might be forgiven for thinking so, anyway, after reading Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s first novel, The Organs of Sense (227 pages; FSG), which tells the story of a young Leibniz, hungry to understand the world, its inscrutable rules, and its even more inscrutable inhabitants. You might also see the novelistic sensibility in Leibniz’s philosophy. Calculus offered a neat method for the world and its rules, but neat methods aren’t all that useful unless you’re trying to ace the SATs or go to the moon. It’s …Continue reading
Posted in Book Reviews
Tagged Adam Ehrlich Sachs, book review, fiction, fsg, Gottfried Leibniz, novel
Leave a comment
