In the 1864 novella Notes From the Underground, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky proposes the proto-existentialist notion of “perverse freedom.” There are never no choices in life, because one can always, at any time, choose to act against one’s own self-interest — to act in a way that’s contrary to all expected motivations. Dostoevsky himself spent […]
Book reviews
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘Sound Fury’ by Mark Levine
Things not to do: read Mark Levine’s Sound Fury while battling a nasty rhinovirus. Here’s why: Levine (deftly) uses so many literary devices simultaneously that one really needs the full use of their faculties to experience Sound Fury (University of Iowa Press). In my first round of reading, while sick, I thought I’d be compelled […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Oblivion’ by Robin Hemley
What to say about Robin Hemley’s Oblivion? The University of Iowa Writers Workshop alum’s 16th book was released this year on Gold Wake Press. And although it’s short in pages, the novel is not short on big ideas. Oblivion follows a nameless writer who dies and passes into The Cafe of Minor Authors in the […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘Love and Potato Salad’ by Jason Thomas Smith
I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t going to read Love and Potato Salad until I read the press quotes on the back of the book. Riddled with jokes but also, quite possibly, real exclamations from shocked readers (“‘Your novel is extremely offensive. Any further attempts to contact any members of our staff for any […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Saved By Schindler: The Life of Celina Karp Biniaz’ by William B. Friedricks
“I am a Holocaust survivor, and every survival story is unique. What makes mine unique is that I was fortunate enough to be on ‘Schindler’s List.’” These are the words of Celina Karp Biniaz, one of youngest to be included on Schindler’s List and among the last of the remaining survivors. The story of how […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘Searching for Petco’ by Skylar Alexander
Searching for Petco (Forklift Books, 2022) opens like someone suddenly turned on a speaker. I felt accosted by author Skylar Alexander’s opening poems: clearly meant to be spoken, clearly friends with slam poetry. Extra-sensory and openly branded “millennial.” Alexander brazenly powers into an image, hands her reader an archetype and disarms them on entry. “Oh,” […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘Team Photograph’ by Lauren Haldeman
Little Village comic contributor Lauren Haldeman’s fourth book, Team Photograph (out Nov. 8 from Sarabande Books) is a poignant exploration of how we’re shaped by the places where we grow up. This graphic novel combines Haldeman’s iconic wolf-headed style with erasure poetry to rehash her youth on soccer fields 800 feet away from the battlefields […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review and Q&A: Sarah Thankam Mathews — ‘All This Could Be Different’
When I started reading All This Could Be Different (Viking, 2022) by Sarah Thankam Mathews, I was nervous about the passive voice, tonally similar to other books I’ve recently read which I felt lacked substance. But this is intentional. Our narrator, Sneha, is apathetic, barely teasing interest, she merely exists for the first part of […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review and Q&A: Tom Montgomery Fate — ‘The Long Way Home’
To be born in the Midwest is to become acutely aware of the term “flyover country.” And once you are aware of it, you must decide whether or not you’ll embrace your life here regardless or denounce it and move somewhere else, somewhere more conventionally beautiful and wild. Maybe, if you’ve chosen the former, you […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘The Length of a Clenched Fist’ by L.A. Felleman
Written as a calendar documenting March through October, a single narrator moves through life in lockdown in L.A. Felleman’s The Length of a Clenched Fist (Finishing Line Press). If I hadn’t lived through 2020 I might not understand references like “While Italians Sing Arias From Balconies” (the first poem’s title) or “the square / Marked […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘A Map for the Missing’ by Belinda Huijuan Tang
After the dedications page of her debut novel, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Belinda Huijuan Tang quotes Homer’s The Odyssey, a fitting harbinger for the journey she will take us on. Although A Map for the Missing (Penguin Press) is not the lighthearted summer read you might be looking for right now, it’s one […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Endlessly Ever After’ by Laurel Snyder, ill. by Dan Santat
Poet Laurel Snyder, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, is a Geisel Award-winning children’s book author. Endlessly Ever After is her first collaboration with Caldecott Award-winning illustrator Dan Santat (beloved in my home for his work on Corey Rosen Schwartz’s The Three Ninja Pigs). It is not, however, her first pick-your-path book. Her first published work, […]
