Everything is Exhumed: Michael Pitre’s Postmodern Elegy
J.A. Bernstein says of Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this might be the best novel to come out of the current carnage in Iraq.”
J.A. Bernstein says of Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that this might be the best novel to come out of the current carnage in Iraq.”
“West of Sunset is a welcome corrective for the Shakespeare-in-Love brand of writer idolatry, in which talent and will overcome all obstacles. Instead, this is the portrait of the artist as an old man, after the promise and the fame have been stripped away, and only the writing remains.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Anne Tyler’s newest novel: “Some fault her for sentiment or repetition, some find her characters too similarly marked by eccentricities of behavior and occupation. But others, like myself, believe authentic sentiment gets a bad rap, and recognize her people. Behind the public curtains, whose family, what profession, isn’t a little odd?”
In Part II, Scott F. Parker considers Kesey’s ties to the “pantheon of writers whose lives threaten to overshadow their work.” What did it mean for Kesey to be “as big as he had it in him to be”?
In Part I, Scott F. Parker meditates on Kesey’s influence in and around Eugene. “Everything I knew about Kesey at the time of his death I’d absorbed from the ether of Eugene,” Parker writes. “Being in Kesey’s general proximity was one of my first moments of thinking The World of Events connected at some points with the world outside my window.”
Post Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the characters in Tom Cooper’s debut novel, The Marauders, struggle to survive in a world whose customs and cultures are rapidly “disappearing, crumbling to the Gulf.”
Rebecca Scherm on using charts while working on her debut novel, Unbecoming: “It helps me remember how messy this process was, how difficult. I need to see the record of that mess to believe that I can do this again.”
In her review of Marilynne Robinson’s newest novel, Lila, Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes of the author’s work, “all four of Robinson’s novels—Housekeeping as well as the Gilead trilogy—are united by her compassionate attention to the possibility for amazing, transcendent grace breaking through and illuminating flawed human existence and our daily experience.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell says of Robert Hellenga’s new novel: “The greatest charm of this book is Frances herself, her tart, funny voice. Hellenga’s characters are flawed, striving, likeable. Frances Godwin may be my favorite of the whole tribe.”
