Have Words–Will Write 'Em

Often her protagonists aren’t readily likable—they have good intentions and do or try to do mostly good things, but they are flawed. It’s the aim of Evans’s writing to create characters that are as flawed and sometimes as unsavory as the typical human being—if there is such a thing. Other characters don’t realize just how defective they are.

You can read my review of Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories in The Brooklyn Rail by clicking the image below.

You can buy Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories at Barnes & Noble.

But racism is only a part of the tension. Amanda has gotten incomplete news alerts on her phone about a blackout, and soon, cell phone reception is down completely. WiFi doesn’t work. There’s still electricity to charge a phone, but to what purpose? Later, they hear a noise “so loud that it was almost a physical presence, so sudden because of course there was no precedent.

You can read my review of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
in The Brooklyn Rail by clicking the image below.

You can buy Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind at Barnes & Noble.

As usual, Clegg’s prose is simple and graceful, his third-person character portraits precise, but his plotting, with its intricate, keen-minded twists give his writing the cumulative effect of poetic ambiguity and mystery. Clegg’s first novel was a novel of grief; this is a masterly story of an attempt at righting the misunderstandings of the past that is resonant and true to life’s inherent uncertainty.

You can read my review of Bill Clegg’s The End of the Day in The Boston Globe by clicking the image below.

You can buy Bill Clegg’s The End of the Day at Barnes & Noble.

Still, Gifty admits that at “a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be.” Gifty (and, I think, Gyasi) believes that science and belief in religion can coexist. That’s a philosophy shared by many real scientists like Carlo Rovelli and Mario Livio. Gifty even says, “Both [science and religion] became, for me, valuable ways of seeing.” For the fictional neuroscientist Gifty, though, both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.

You can read my review of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom in The Brooklyn Rail by clicking the image below.

You can buy Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom at Barnes & Noble.

The allusions and the quotations, the sociopolitical philosophy and the implied and actual violence move the story along at a bipolar pace, alternately restrained and frenzied, but Kunzru adds elements of humor that lessen the horror of reading about a man’s tumble into breakdown and insanity, and his eventual recovery, at least, up to the November 8th election results.

You can read my review of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill in The Brooklyn Rail by clicking the image below.

You can buy Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill at Barnes & Noble.

It takes the two men a while and a few pints for them to open up to each other. “There is a reason why men don’t talk about their feelings. It’s not just that it’s difficult, or embarrassing. It’s almost impossible. The words aren’t really there.” Ah, but in wine there is truth and in beer there is ‘drunken sense’ and the two manage to do a lot of storytelling. Joe reveals that he’s left his wife, Trish, for another woman, Jessica, whom Joe and Davy were each infatuated with more than 30 years ago.

You can read my review of Roddy Doyle’s Love in the Boston Globe by clicking the image below.

You can buy Roddy’s Doyle’s Love at Barnes & Noble.

In his introduction, Shapiro, who teaches at Columbia University, writes that it was the election of Donald Trump as president that led him to write the book. The author wrestles with the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and he even visits red states in the South, to talk with audiences about Shakespeare and “grapple with what, from inside my blue state bubble, I had failed to understand about where the country was heading.” He succeeds, however, in presenting an even-handed account of Shakespeare and American politics, though his observations, comments, and conclusions convey an unmistakably liberal viewpoint.

You can read my review of James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America in the Christian Science Monitor by clicking the image below.

You can buy Shakespeare in a Divided America at Barnes and Noble.

The narrator asks Cliff if he’s ever read Wuthering Heights. Cliff says no. She, of course, has read it, and is re-reading it. As Wuthering Heights incorporates elements of Gothic and Romance fiction told in two stories, Heathcliff Redux embraces an interior story of a sort, too. ‘Redux’ is told in short chapters, sometimes as brief as a single sentence with a footnote, but ‘Redux’s’ interior ‘story’ consists of excerpts from Wuthering Heights, some of Brontë’s poems, criticism of Brontë, and it integrates elements of modern fiction with culinary elements borrowed from cozy mysteries and chic lit. Not only is there a recipe for boeuf bourguignon, but there’s the reminder to use a Bordeaux or a Burgundy for the three cups of red wine. What’s more, there’s a pithy recipe for spaghetti: boil a lot of water and add spaghetti. Isn’t that why we read fiction?

You can read my review of Lily Tuck’s Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Other Stories by clicking the image below.

“Disputes about the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic offer another parallel. In an email interview with America, Livio was as frank as I believe Galileo would have been. He wrote:”

There is no question that the initial dismissive response of the administration to the scientists’ warnings concerning the coronavirus has had disastrous consequences…. One of the most important lessons from the Galileo affair has been: Believe in science! To bet against science when human life is at stake is insane.

You can read my review of Mario Livio’s Galileo and the Science Deniers by clicking the image below.

You can buy Galileo and the Science Deniers at Barnes and Noble.

In Yoon’s work—Snow Hunters, Once the Shore (2009), and a few of the stories in The Mountain (2017)—war, with all of its attendant obscenity and evil, shapes Yoon’s characters, while the characters attempt to shape their patch of war. In a sense, Yoon presents war as something of a major character that influences nearly everything from life in all its forms: human, plant, animal, to nature itself. The obscenity—the killing, torture, and bombings—are mostly accomplished off-page or as half scenes, yet the revenge-killing of an interrogator is rather graphic.

You can read my review of Paul Yoon’s novel, Run Me to Earth, at The Brooklyn Rail by clicking the image below.

You can buy Run Me to Earth at Barnes and Noble.

Today’s divisive, clamorous politics and President Trump himself offer abundant reason to read these essays, some more than 75 years old, today. In his introduction to the book, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jon Meacham calls President Trump an “opportunistic real estate and reality TV showman.”

You can read my review of On Democracy in the Portland Press Herald by clicking the image below.

You can buy On Democracy at Barnes &Noble.

If thou art a fan of the current president, thou wilt not care for this story. The authors insist that “MacTrump” is full of alternate facts and fake characters and “if any of our characters sound smarter, stupider, similar, or dissimilar to any celebrity or public figure, alive or dead, there’s a reason: this book is a parody.”

You can read my review of MacTrump in The Oregonian by clicking the image below.

You can buy MacTrump at Barnes &Noble

As you might imagine, Boyle’s story is a page-turner. It would take an absolute hack to write a dull a novel about sex and drugs. That’s not to slight Boyle who captures the period perfectly. He’s done his research on drug research, and he doesn’t fill his characters mouths with a lot of the slang of the day. Sure, there’s the occasional taste of the Beat “hepcat,” “squares,” and “downer,” for verisimilitude, but Boyle nearly apologizes for the vernacular by saying it’s “another descriptor he [Charlie] dug out of his Beat dictionary.”

You can read my Brooklyn Rail review of Boyle’s Outside Looking In by clicking the image below.

You can buy Boyle’s Outside Looking In at Barnes & Noble.

You can read my Brooklyn Rail review of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys  by clicking the image below.

Violence, racism, and ways to confront them are the themes of the book, a hot-button topic, considering the current state of the country: a racist president whose words influence, directly or indirectly, violence and mass-murders by domestic terrorists, unnecessary killings by bigoted cops, and national news commentators who insist that white supremacy is a hoax.

You can buy Whitehead’s Nickle Boys at Barnes & Noble.

In Russell’s World stories possess the strangeness that the critic Harold Bloom values as one criterion for inclusion in his Western Canon. Russell’s stories concern love and lost love, friendship, and fear; greed, abandonment, and guilt. Her tales may derive from Shakespeare as Bloom might insist, but they definitely owe a debt to ancient mythology, Americana, and classic European literature.

You can read my Brooklyn Rail review of Karen Russell’s Orange World and Other Stories by clicking the image below.

You can buy Russell’s Orange World at Barnes & Noble.

Ranging from a few pages to no more than 10, they’re the sort of fiction that I’d typically call vignettes, a word too highfalutin to describe these pieces. Most of them are light-hearted, zany and crazy bordering on comic-sociopathic, which makes them fun to read, almost like watching squirrels fighting over their walnut treasures. Or not — depending on your temperament.

You can read my review of Chuck Kloststerman’s story collection by clicking on the image below.

You can buy Chuck Kloststerman’s story collection from Barnes & Noble.

A former school teacher, Nina is always doing favors for everyone: first checking in on her ailing mother, then taking her to doctor’s appointments, and finally selling her own house, so she could live with and help Mamá Meche. But after doing a favor for a friend, her maid Rumalda, Nina finds herself entangled in human trafficking. Rumalda begs Nina to shelter her daughter and granddaughter after they are smuggled across the border. She lets them stay in the pink house while they wait to be taken farther into the U. S. The woman Nina deals with at first seems innocuous enough, but her associates El Kobe and Rigo are dangerous. After Nina does the favor for Rumalda, El Kobe and Rigo bring more Central American immigrants across the border to the pink house. El Kobe pays Nina $50 a day for the house, the food she makes, and to keep quiet. In a few days, Nina collects more money from El Kobe than Mamá Meche collected for a month’s rent.

You can read my review of Oscar Cásares’s novel Where We Come From, in the June 2019, edition of The Brooklyn Rail by clicking on the image below.

You can buy Oscar Cásares’s Where We Come From at Barnes & Noble.

Like a George Plimpton or a Hunter S. Thompson, Frisch becomes so involved in the story that he becomes part of it—in this case, a magician—which is probably less risky than being tackled by a bunch of huge football players or getting beaten up by bikers.

You can read my review of Ian Frisch’s Magic Is Dead in the April 3, 2019,  edition of The Brooklyn Rail by clicking on the image below. <p>

You can buy Ian Frisch’s Magic is Dead at Barnes & Noble.

It was practically the Alter family credo, an anti-Hippocratic oath: “First, Do No Good.”

In keeping with that possible credo, Arthur has a girlfriend 30 years his junior whom he was seeing even when Francine was dying. The offspring suspect that Arthur has ulterior motives for inviting them home, but, optimistically, they fly to St. Louis anyway.

You can read my review of Andrew Ridker’s Altruists in March 17, edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by clicking on the image below.

You can buy Andrew Ridker’s first novel, The Alchemists, at Barnes & Noble.

Like any good detective story, there’s plenty of adventure, violence, some sex, and there’s that opossum, too. Everyone loves opossums, don’t they? But this allegory disguised as a detective story portrays political division in America – between rural and city folk, men and women, old and young.

You can read my review of Jonathan’s Feral Detective, by Jonathan Lethem by clicking the picture below.

You can buy The Feral Detective, Jonathan Lethem at Barnes and Noble.