If Not For This, by Pete Fromm
by Heidi Willis
“True love with a cost may be Pete Fromm’s calling card,” writes Heidi Willis in the review of this new novel, “his stories peppered with characters who inhabit broken places.”
“True love with a cost may be Pete Fromm’s calling card,” writes Heidi Willis in the review of this new novel, “his stories peppered with characters who inhabit broken places.”
“This willingness to myth-bust is critical to the continuing maturation of books set in the American West,” writes contributor Laura Pritchett in her review of The Home Place. “La Seur is elegant and graceful and quiet in her approach, but she succeeds.”
“In Forest of Fortune, Ruland combines the tropes of hardboiled crime fiction with the creepy appeal of a ghost story, and riffs on elements from addiction/recovery narratives.”
“The Devil in the Marshalsea is anything but a quaint period piece, a costume drama in prose. There are a few well-stuffed, beribboned bodices, but this novel is a grim tale of an eighteenth-century crime (owing money) and punishment (prison for same).”
“It’s an exciting book, full of high-stakes drag races, dangerous driving, crimes and betrayals, and gut-wrenching close calls, all rendered with Harrison’s literary sensibilities.”
“Like its predecessors, Beautiful Soul appears postmodern in its aesthetics and innovations in that it leverages devices common to the Nouveau Roman and Experimental Novel.”
Matthew Batt reviews Halina Duraj’s The Family Cannon: “What binds it is the fierce and loyal will of the one who knows she has to keep weaving these stray bits of stick and story and trash and grass back together to make us who we are—family.”
Twenty years after its initial publication in Britain, Geoff Dyer’s The Search appears in American print.
The secrets George Orwell revealed in Down and Out in London and Paris pale in comparison to the practices in the Camdentown kitchen of The Swan.
Mannequin Girl, Ellen Litman’s second novel, is a coming-of-age story and a family drama set in a Moscow boarding school for children with scoliosis.
Sharon Harrigan on Kyle Minor’s second collection, Praying Drunk, “a tipsy, dizzy spiritual pleading.”
In its most poignant passages, A Life in Men unpacks the tired clichés about living life to the fullest.
