In a Bear’s Eye, by Yannick Murphy
by Brian Short
Anton Chekhov is a C-9A Nightingale. Cormac McCarthy is a Focke-Wulf Butcher-Bird with cowboy boot decals. Lorrie Moore is a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. Fun, right?
Anton Chekhov is a C-9A Nightingale. Cormac McCarthy is a Focke-Wulf Butcher-Bird with cowboy boot decals. Lorrie Moore is a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. Fun, right?
At the FGIBI party, I had the chance to meet Jami Attenberg, whose novel-in-stories Instant Love I recently read and admired. Instant Love follows an ensemble of vivid characters whose lives intersect as they stumble upon, after, or away from romance. Whether the passion in question is fleeting or fundamental, each story sharpens to a fine narrative point–a moment of connection or dissolution. The effect of reading these stories together satisfies more than merely sampling one. Attenberg makes me believe in her characters’ lives beyond the page by offering scenes across shared history (spanning high-school romances to hasty marriages and […]
Set in and around the fictional town of Vaughn, Brown’s stories contain characters driven by duty and guilt down paths furrowed by their own lapses and eccentricities. A cloud of fatalism hangs over many; the weight of the past—personal, familial, historical—presses constantly at their backs.
The stories David Foster Wallace contributed to Harper’s are now available online. “The Depressed Person” (first published in 1998) is a powerful piece, now harrowing to reconsider. I’ll admit I couldn’t get through DFW’s Infinite Jest, but I’ve long admired his shorter prose for its mad genius energy and intelligence. Another must-read, especially for tennis lovers, is “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; an earlier version is available on the Harper’s site).
Divisadero follows three characters through childhood to adolescence on a farm in Northern California’s gold country, a world where the boom is long gone but danger and desperation linger.
This beautiful novel by one of my favorite short-story writers follows the adventures of 22-year-old Lillian Leyb, a recent survivor of a Russian pogrom, from New York’s Lower East Side to Seattle to the remotest parts of Alaska, where she hopes to get a boat to Siberia. (The story is set in the 1920s.) After her husband and parents were murdered before her eyes and her small daughter lost in the fray (and sought for some time), Lillian emmigrated, hoping to escape her haunted past and carve out a life for herself in New York. But just as Lillian’s getting […]
Welcome to the world, FWR. And welcome, world, to the booksite. Here’s hoping we can shine some love on that oft-misunderstood genre called fiction. You can read about our mission here and check out reviews, interviews and essays. We welcome ARCs from publicists and submissions from writers. This blog is going to be a hodge-podge of book news, recommendations, links, reviewlets, and discussions. I make no promises about being fair, balanced, consistent, or completist, but I hope to keep things interesting. Here’s to the lovely and fearless Marissa, who made this site possible, and to all FWR contributors for suspending […]
Two recent debut novels, Joe McGinniss Jr.’s The Delivery Man and Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, are both set in Las Vegas, but this singular city wreaks different havocs on each book’s characters.
I would have paid good money to get inside Emil Stern’s head while he was writing the screenplay adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s dreamy and lyrical novel, The Life Before Her Eyes
