Okay, I had to take a little time out from reading and writing book reviews to get a few final things in order and then have a baby, but now I’m back with some thoughts on Tom Rachman’s really stellar book and, hopefully in the next day or two (if I can successfully take advantage of nap time), some notes on the amazing and magical Laura van den Berg as well. Rachman’s debut novel, which follows the reporters and employees of...

Just last month I reviewed B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse. Some research I was conducting sent me to another title: Different Fleshes, another novel told through poetry, written by Albert Goldbarth.

I am wary of sincerity.  Is it because I am incapable of appearing to possess it even if I feel possessed by it?  I joked with a friend recently that I am capable of competing with almost anything but the hint of sincerity.  Its place in art necessarily troubled given that by definition the creative act is an artificial one, a construct by which feeling is enacted and/or elicited—sincerity remains misunderstood.  And yet it is...

Scott Hightower “Mutiny Gallery” B.K. Fischer (Winner of the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize) Truman State University Press, 2011, $18.00 B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, a novel in verse, is an act of earnest imagination. In a period when much poetry is thin- I biography, it is refreshing to come to a first book that is provocatively metaphoric and hearty… and with a personae, one surmises, set apart from the author. The premise of the...

Book 4 of 100 Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight            It’s taken me awhile to write this review. I wanted some time to reflect on this memoir before commenting on it. In this book, Alexandra Fuller (“Bobo,” as she’s called throughout her childhood), recounts her experiences of growing up in South Africa with her parents and older sister, Vanessa. Her story is interesting, but I can’t say the...

(T)ravel Un(T)ravel, Neil Shepard’s fourth book of poetry delivers the dependable style and rational weight of Shepard’s previous books –– and it takes a step further out into both the geographic and literary world.

Book 3 of 100 Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore’s slim novel took me two tries. I sat down some number of months ago and read the first eight pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, the book’s opening section. It felt too dense and disconnected—I couldn’t find anything to grasp onto to pull myself through. I felt a little bored. I put the book away. When I came back, the first eight pages were still slow, and it...

Book 2 of 100 Kathryn Stockett, The Help I’m happy to report that so far I’m about two-and-a-half times as fast at reading than I am at reviewing. : ) Stockett’s novel chronicles the lives of several southern women in the early 1960’s: Black maids caring for white children and families, as well as a few of the white women who have hired them. Just home from college and swept up by the momentum of the early stirrings of the...

Book 1 of 100 Karen Russell, Swamplandia! Here’s the truth: It will be impossible for my review of this book to be unbiased in any way because I am just pretty much madly in love with Karen Russell. She’s a magnificent writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time with her impressive first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like her debut novel, it too is wonderful, and you should certainly check it out if you have not...

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title. From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach...