“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 […]
Local book reviews
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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘A Playbill For Sunset’ by Dan Campion
Formulaic poetry seems to be simultaneously under- and overrated, something force-fed us by teachers and then never seen again — as though only the archaic men of our textbooks were allowed to use the respective forms. Truthfully, formulaic poems have never actually left the literary milieu. In A Playbill For Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), […]
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Book Review: ‘Olga Dies Dreaming’ by Xochitl Gonzalez
The fact that Aubrey Plaza will play the main character in an upcoming Hulu adaptation of Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming is the least interesting thing about the book. Olga Dies Dreaming (Flatiron Books) is everything a novel should be and more. In 369 pages, Gonzalez subjects us to curiosity, heartbreak, lust, intrigue […]
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Book Review: ‘Liminal: Shadow Agent’ Parts 1 & 2, by Jon Cone
In the letter that author Jon Cone sent along with the first two volumes of his Liminal: Shadow Agent project (Greying Ghost), he calls the slim books “comic book scripts.” They are, in a sense. They tell a pictureless story of a superhero entering a fight against a great evil. The dialogue is called out […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: MEKTOUB — ‘Elizabeth’
In 2019, frequenters of Goosetown Café mingled with friends of John Rapson to delight in the new band he had assembled: MEKTOUB. It was a trio, initially — Rapson on the keys, Ryan Smith on woodwinds and Nielo Gaglione on vocals and mandole. Together, the three produced a distinct style of improvisational music they describe […]
