Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Aaron Cance’

Shop Talk |

Book of the Week: The Lighthouse Road, by Peter Geye

Our current feature is Peter Geye’s new novel, The Lighthouse Road, which was published by Unbridled Books in October. He is also the author of Safe from the Sea. Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PhD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. He’s also worked as a bartender, banker, bookseller, copywriter, and cook. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he continues to live there with his wife and three children. In the introduction to his recent review of The Lighthouse Road, Contributor Aaron Cance writes: Set at the cusp of […]


Interviews |

The Man and the Making: An Interview with Bruce Machart

“Thunderstruck,” Aaron Cance describes his reading of Bruce Machart’s two debut books: a novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, and a story collection, Men in the Making, out this week. They also discuss the themes of faith, masculinity, and love, and how a New England basement is a helpful metaphor for writing.


Interviews |

The Cruel Riddle of History: An Interview with Jonathan Evison

Aaron Cance interviews Jonathan Evison about his new novel, West of Here, a rich and complex self-examination, a study of the struggle between the human need to move forward and the historical inertia that is the result of our congested lifestyles. Its flawed, yet sympathetic cast of characters is compelling, as are the philosophical questions it poses. Although it will assuredly take its rightful place in the canon of American Western fiction, readers would do well to think of this work as something more than just another novel.


Reviews |

Reading Responsibility and Friendship in Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets

In Icelandic author Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets, the narrator spends the novel hiding under his bed as his “friends,” who assume he isn’t home, gather in his apartment. Aaron Cance reviews this voyeuristic tale, its quirky narrative, and its debt to Moby Dick.


Interviews |

The Text You Can’t Control: An Interview with Jacob Paul

“We create things that we hope will, someday, become objects of value. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many writers–Foer, DeLillo, and Roth, to name just a few–all came out with 9/11 novels. I was initially bothered by this. I wanted to say, ‘Fuck you; I was there.’ This passed for a couple reasons. First was the realization that we’re all survivors of one type or another. Second, these texts can never really become authoritative positions on the experiences of a group of people, no matter how well written they are or how well credentialed their creators might be. There’s no uniform experience of being a 9/11 survivor, no uniform experience of being a woman. These are things that can’t be owned by anyone.”