“The Ecstasy of Influence is a book worth reading—it redraws the map of popular culture and, in so doing, pushes us beyond the confines of our comfortable minds, out into the larger world
“Miraculously, however, there isn’t an ounce of self-pity in the book. Instead, Mr. Doughty proceeds with a healthy mix of objectivity and irony. . . .
“All of the works collected in Kafkaesque prove both edifying and entertaining . . . A fine, intelligent, and exquisitely bizarre collection of fiction.”
“Equal parts fantasy and gritty realism, Promises to Keep is, above all, an artfully imagined clarion call to embrace the challenges of daily life, . . .”
In Nazareth, North Dakota, debut novelist Tommy Zurhellen lovingly reimagines the New Testament as a series of interlocking tales set in the northernmost regions of the American heartland.
Although Sarah Gardner Borden’s compelling debut, Games to Play After Dark, has drawn reasonable comparisons to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, it might be more constructive to
If Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries reads like an homage to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his posthumously published The Petting Zoo finds the author paying tribute to
Although it bears all the trappings of a taut legal thriller, Dead Center, by Joanna Higgins is, at heart, a riveting existential meditation on living with uncertainty.
Howard Owen’s The Reckoning examines the complex relationships between fathers and sons as well as the unerring tendency of the past to haunt the present.
The promotional materials that accompanied my review copy of James Franco’s debut fiction collection, Palo Alto, set the bar impossibly high for the 30-something actor-turned-writer.
In X’ed Out, artist and writer Charles Burns returns to many of the themes and images that made his magnum opus, Black Hole, both a pleasure and a challenge to read.
How to Read the Air finds Dinaw Mengestu building on many of the themes that made his debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, both a delight and a sorrow to read.
