Book Reviews
A Lesser Day
A Lesser Day borrows it title from the narrator’s habit of taking a photograph each day, no matter how unremarkable the occasion. And as its central conceit suggests, the novel focuses on the metaphysical significance behind the quotidian. Its mission is awareness, seeing, and in her devotion to this goal Scrima’s novel resembles an urban Annie Dillard. The tenements of New York City and Germany are her Tinker Creek, and the narrator’s galaxy of reclaimed objects her Appalachian wilderness. Like Pilgrim to Tinker Creek, the author seems to strive for a Thoreauvian “meteorological journal of the mind.”read »
Fiction
Yarnivores
Fiction
You’ll probably find this funny, because people usually find it funny when I tell them. I used to work as a waiter at this place called Merry Olde England British Pub over in Five Points. Obviously, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that I had to dress in a bowler hat and talk in a phony English…
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Strangers In the Living Room
Fiction
When I got to Matt’s house, he met me at the door with this puzzled look on his face. There were strangers in the living room. “Who are they?” I asked. “I don’t know.” “Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons?” “I don’t think so.” “Friends of Donna’s?” “I guess so.” “Hi, I’m Bill,” I said, walking in and shaking hands with the nearest…
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My Kind of Utmost Tender
Fiction
“I find myself inclined to stop a moment in my present station, and to ponder that voyage, which I have undertaken…I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human…
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The Scraping Sound of Auto Parts
Fiction
Your little sister is late. Outside the terminal, a slight drizzle slants in the orange streetlights. Everyone else on your flight has long since been picked up or connected to another destination. You hear her car before you see it, a scraping sound of auto parts traveling across potholes. As soon as she pulls up, your nephew climbs through the…
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Whaling Song
Fiction
“Are you Middle-Eastern?” She leaned forward with her knees pressed together. “I’m Italian and Polish.” It was a common misconception. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and over the tanned skin of his face a five o’clock shadow which, left to its own devices, transformed itself into a dark and exceptionally full beard. His name was equally deceiving. “Is it…
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Columns
Christa Faust’s Money Shot Cashes In
Columns
Hard Case Crime recently turned 50. The independent publishing house dedicated to all things pulp has published over 50 titles since it opened for business in 2005. And what a business for lovers of crime fiction: HCC not only reissues out of print classics by…
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Doing It Right: Interview with Gregg Hurwitz
Columns
Los Angeles. The city of (fallen) angels has lured many crime fiction writers over the years, its truths often stranger than fiction. From Hollywood to Echo Park, L.A. is a siren song of corruption, racial tension, drugs, and silicone implants. Perfect grist for a writer’s…
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Easyreeder
Columns
WEEK 1 UNRELIABLE NARRATOR Do you want a reliable narrator? An unreliable narrator? If there is any first-person element to your narration, there’s one answer: all people lie to themselves, all people are unreliable. The question is of degree. While extremely unreliable narrators are fascinating…
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[CRIME CORNER] Lawrence Block: Romance of the Ordinary Life
Columns
Lawrence Block, Hit and Run 304 pages, $24.95 Published by William Morrow Keller is back. This spring, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block rolled out the latest exploits of Keller, full-time assassin and amateur philatelist. Block’s newest novel in 3 years, Hit and…
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[CRIME CORNER] Busted: Ken Bruen & Jason Starr Kill The Lone Wolf Enterprise
Columns
by Brendan McCall Essayist Edward Hoagland once told me that writing was a ‘real lone-wolf enterprise.’ Obviously, crime fiction authors Ken Bruen and Jason Starr missed that memo. In 2006, the duo wrote Bust (Barry Award nomination for “Best Paperback Novel of the Year"). This…
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Interviews
Blue-Eyed Devil: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
Interviews
by David Hunter On the surface, Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America seems like it will be a "let's get to know the neighbors" punk-rock companion piece to Paul Barrett's American Islam. If that doesn't quite describe it, it's because author Michael Muhammad…
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Ken Foster: From Literary Impressario to Pit Bull Advocate
Interviews
Not a Sunday night goes by when I don't think of Ken Foster. As I stand behind the duct-taped podium wedged in the corner of the KGB Bar, just as I am about to introduce the authors, I think: Would he approve of my selection?…
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Jhumpa Lahiri on PEN’s World Voices
Interviews
Interview by Suzanne Dottino I met Jhumpa Lahiri when she read from her novel, The Namesake , at KGB Bar as part of the Sunday Night Fiction Series along with Susan Choi (author of American Woman). Jhumpa arrived carrying her firstborn wrapped in a blanket…
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On a Clear Night You Can Read Forever: Scribblers on the Roof
Interviews
by Mary Phillips-Sandy For more than fifty years a synagogue has stood at the northeast corner of West End Avenue and West 100th Street in Manhattan. The synagogue is called Congregation Ansche Chesed, and in the summer of 1999 its roof became home to an…
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Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi
Interviews
by John Haskell I recently went to the show at the Noguchi Museum called "Best of Friends," an exhibition chronicling the collaborations between Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, and what struck me wasn't the work itself, but the sense of idealism that their work was…
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Book Reviews
Big in Japan: A Ghost Story
Book Reviews
This is, as one advanced internet reviews put it, not a book you would lend to your mom. It’s a book you filch from your bawdy older brother’s collection. I’d call it brutalist lad lit. Think a more jocular Joshua Furst, a much smarter Chuck Palahniuk. Think a hipper cross-cultural version of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons as narrated by the suitors.
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Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s
Book Reviews
The absolute first thing to be said about the book, however, is that Tim Page’s memoir reads like the biography of a reclusive rock star. Its pages teem with warm characters and hilarious, heartbreaking stories. At its heart the story is about otherness, and it explodes stereotypes of Aspies standing aloof from the full deluge of human drama. Page may be deeply uncomfortable in social situations, but this doesn't deprive his tale of warmth or human color — by contrast, it enhances its poignancy.
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The Farther Shore
Book Reviews
Matthew Eck’s first novel, The Farther Shore, succeeds as a “true” war story. Josh Stantz, the novel’s narrator, despite being told by his lieutenant to “stop thinking so much, ”does not try to find meaning in the shadowy, haunted city, presumably somewhere in Africa, that he patrols. Eck, a former solider in Somalia and Haiti, resists the urge to become didactic and instead focuses on creating a world where the dead must be forgotten so that the living may be preserved.
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Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Book Reviews
While superstition, belief in evil spirits, or fear of bad karma is certainly not culture-specific (my Irish grandmother kept banshees away by rubbing her fingers raw on Rosary Beads), Díaz uses it as a foundation to explain the remarkably tough tidings that befall the good people of the Dominican Republic and one of its misplaced sons, Oscar Wao.
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Mykel Board’s EVEN A DAUGHTER IS BETTER THAN NOTHING
Book Reviews
Mykel Board's Even A Daughter Is Better Than Nothing lacks the type of overt soul-searching and self-discovery that one might expect from a travel book, much less one in which the author travels to Outer Mongolia, "a place as distant and foreboding as the moon."…
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