Book Reviews
The Farther Shore
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.read »
Fiction
A B Plan
Fiction
Samantha Hunt Sometimes I give speeches at elementary schools. I wait backstage in the wings where they hang the discarded costumes of the four food groups, costumes that are now unused, in light of the Surgeon General’s newly revised food pyramid. From here I overhear the students asking questions like, “Who is this guy?” or “What were they doing on…
read »
Despite Herself
Fiction
Image used with permission from Mentality Design [Excerpt] Even though he is across the room and reading I know he is watching me. My boyfriend likes to keep tabs on where I am so he can determine where we are. My boyfriend seems to think he has a sixth sense with me and annoyingly, I agree. But then again, that…
read »
Tell the Story of Your Father’s Life
Fiction
Tell the story of your father’s life, and your father’s father’s life, and find your own, or find something altogether new, an antipodes of the expected. Expect to find, what? A history of habitude? A cacophony of drunks? Shocking, to learn of hidden happinesses swallowed by the undulating recitation of history. “He lost everything gambling, and, rueful of the homeward…
read »
Jelly
Fiction
Vernon Wilson “What the fuck was I saying? Nothing about what you were saying right?” My hand fell on Tasha’s arm. We were on Canal Street going towards Broadway. We’d been waiting for the light when Natasha, in this sly way she does—with a fluttering of the eyes—she said, “When we went out this morning you were about to tell…
read »
Gongguan Digressions // 公館漫遊
Fiction
In his 7th floor apartment on Roosevelt Road, Wan Hao-hsien (溫浩賢) anguishes over what his new kitchen god shrine design should look like. If life imitated television dramas and commercials, Taipei would be run entirely by eager young college graduates with androgynous haircuts. But in reality, the city has endless ways of humiliating the young. Take Hao-hsien, for example –…
read »
Columns
[CRIME CORNER] Finishing The Job: Collins Completes Spillane Swan Song
Columns
by Brendan McCall Halloween is a time of tricks and mischief. This past Halloween marked the release date of a special treat for crime fiction fans: a new book by Mickey Spillane, the godfather of the pulps. Dead Street (Hard Case Crime) bears a number…
read »
Novel Appearances: French Book Art at the New York Public Library
Columns
by Anne K. Yoder A thin forest green box lies adrift in a sea of papers: meticulous diagrams of conical and cylindrical machine parts, a small sliver with a few words, a vortex of ninety-three sheets sprawling outward from the center. Large letters composed of…
read »
The Lieutenant of Inishmore - Martin McDonagh’s Comically Violent Thriller
Columns
by Priya Jain At the beginning of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, two men are standing in a small, bleak living room; the beaten-up chairs and stained walls, and the sparse black-rock landscape beyond those walls, let you know immediately that this particular Irish tale isn’t…
read »
The Fear of Large and Small Nations
Columns
By Nancy Agabian {Excerpt} I was sitting between two men on the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Yerevan, at 1 in the morning, September 10, 2005. The man to my left was large and mid 40’s, with brown hair and brown moustache, and his friend…
read »
When In Rome, Do As The Russians Did
Columns
by Victoria Gomelsky Straining to revive long-forgotten memories, I stared at the balcony of my former apartment, a one-bedroom I shared with my parents and twin sister in the fall of 1978, when we joined thousands of Soviet Jewish émigrés living in the coastal town…
read »
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…
read »
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?…
read »
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…
read »
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…
read »
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…
read »
Book Reviews
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.
read »
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."…
read »
Lara Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse
Book Reviews
Lara Vapnyar's first novel, Memoirs of a Muse, tells the story of Tanya, a young woman who moves from Moscow to live with her struggling immigrant relatives in 1980's Brighton Beach. Tanya's romantic experience at her Soviet university has been limited and disappointing, and her…
read »
Michelle Wildgen’s YOU’RE NOT YOU
Book Reviews
One of the great challenges in writing fiction about illness is keeping the story about people when the reality of medical constraints threatens to dominate. While readers want their authors to get the details of a disease right, the works that resonate are the ones…
read »
Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place
Book Reviews
In The Thin Place, Kathryn Davis creates another world, a semblance similar to the one we inhabit, yet composed of different primordial ether. Davis details the events of one season in a conjured New England town. And conjured it is, for seemingly ordinary Varennes is…
read »
See articles by contributor on the Contributors' Page »
Monthly Archives
September, 2008, August, 2008, July, 2008, June, 2008, May, 2008, April, 2008, February, 2008, December, 2007, November, 2007, October, 2007, August, 2007, May, 2007, March, 2007, February, 2007, January, 2007, December, 2006, November, 2006, October, 2006, September, 2006, March, 2006,
KGB Bar Calendar
Upcoming Events
- Tue. 01/06 8:00 pm
- Wed. 01/07 8:00 pm
- Thu. 01/08 8:00 pm
- Fri. 01/09 8:00 pm
- Sat. 01/10 8:00 pm
- Sun. 01/11 11:52 am
- Wed. 01/14 8:00 pm
- Thu. 01/15 8:00 pm
- Fri. 01/16 8:00 pm
- Sun. 01/18 12:00 pm
- Wed. 01/21 8:00 pm
- Thu. 01/22 8:00 pm
- Fri. 01/23 8:00 pm
- Sun. 01/25 12:01 pm
- Tue. 01/27 8:00 pm
Calendar RSS Feed
Subscribe to the KGB Bar Calendar RSS Feed