I. Wow. E.E. Charlton-Trujillo’s Fat Angie is a triumph and a mess and funny and brutally honest and gimmicky and clichéd and wonderful and a freaking thousand volts straight to the chest. It’s quite flawed and I could nitpick some of the style for years but. Dang. This book could be a lifeboat. I mean. […]
Vampires in the Lemon Grove is Karen Russell’s second collection of short stories. Her first, St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and her first novel, Swamplandia!, received quite a bit of critical acclaim. Award nominations and whatnot. I didn’t actually get a chance to read Swamplandia! when it first came out, so I […]
I haven’t had a whole bunch of exposure to Jamaica Kincaid. I read Girl (which fairly blew my mind, GO READ THAT!), so there’s that, I guess. But I’m no expert. I’d never read one of her novels before See Now Then. I don’t know much about her life—I mean, I’ve heard that this particular […]
Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series is fantastic. The series is planned to consist of three books, two of which are already out (Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies). The series (at least, so far) tracks Thomas Cromwell, advisor first to Cardinal Wolsey and then to King Henry VIII, through the tumultuous political and religious […]
Teddy Wayne’s latest novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, is about 11-year-old tween pop star, Jonny Valentine, and the circus that is his life. In the book, Jonny relates a few months of his second tour, sparing us nothing—the media hoopla, his infinitely complicated relationship with is mother-manager, daily tour business, his search for […]
Chad Kultgen’s latest novel, The Average American Marriage is the sequel to his provocative first novel, The Average American Male. The Average American Marriage is much like The Average American Male—both are carefully constructed shock-and-awe satires with strong language to provoke, to offend, to teeter just on the edge of memoir. And they are funny. […]
You guys, I did something crazy. I read a non-fiction book. This is … new and different for me. I don’t usually read nonfiction if it’s not about infectious diseases. …By which I mean Ebola. Really, pretty much just Ebola. In middle school and high school my dad got so frustrated with my 100% fiction […]
Tenth of December is Saunders’s fourth collection of short stories, and it is very very good. You may have heard about it. Some have (already) said that it’s the best book of 2013. That’s a lot of faith, or love, or something. And the book is, really, very good. Saunders’s Tenth of December appropriately holds […]