Are the hills of Iowa enmeshed with a vast network of death camps, comparable in moral terms to those of the Holocaust? This is one of the questions raised, indeed hurled, by Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999), a novella-of-ideas by the Afrikaner-Australian and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. In 1997, Coetzee was invited […]
Book review
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘My Lady Melisende’ by Misty Urban
There is a special type of book that I affectionately refer to as the “kettle corn book.” Growing up, there was no food that my stepmom could eat more of than kettle corn. It was simultaneously awing and terrifying how much of it she could put away without thinking about it. A good kettle corn […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: Ben Miller — ‘Pandemonium Logs’
We don’t talk about the tolls the pandemic has taken on each of us. In Ben Miller’s new book Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020-2022 (Rutgers University Press, November 2024) he says the quiet part aloud.
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: Vince Gotera — ‘Dragons & Rayguns’
Although Iowa Poet Laureate Vince Gotera’s collection of speculative poetry, Dragons & Rayguns (Final Thursday Press), is a panoply of allusions (and although I’d boldly state that I understood many of them), it is also in turns sincere, self-deprecating, thought-provoking and tender.
