I’m a bit late to the party in profiling Bloodroot (it came out about a year ago to great acclaim, was featured in Entertainment Weekly and many other venues, and has been routinely applauded on best-debut and best-of-the-year lists) but I wanted to add my voice to the chorus anyway—because I enjoyed Bloodroot very, very much.
I picked up Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees at San Francisco’s recent MLA convention because one of the stories had been published in the same edition of McSweeney’s as a story of mine, and I’d been curious about Doyle ever since (though I hadn’t read any more of his work until now). And while some stories, [...]
This Side of Brightness is one of the most lyrically gorgeous novels I’ve read in quite some time, with quietly lovely and delicate sentences and descriptions that reveal their subjects’ inherent dignity and grace, whether those subjects are 1920s “sandhogs” (diggers who first built the New York City subway tunnels) or the modern day homeless [...]
In a frenzy of eleventh hour book-buying at December’s MLA convention (“All paperbacks three dollars! Everything must go!”) I picked up The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, which became my book of choice for the long flight back to Chicago. I’d read Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation, but this was my—and his—first experience with a book [...]
I’m working on a novel right now dealing heavily with music, and was originally attracted to Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butcher’s Singing Club based on its content–I wanted to see how another writer handled music, in both its description and technical aspects. I quickly discovered, however, that MBSC was only about music on the surface; [...]
I don’t usually focus on non-fiction, just like I don’t usually mention million-seller books. But Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, warrants an exception. Part of this posting is sentimental–my wife and I resolved to read more books together, and this is the first we’ve completed–but it is also out of respect for a well-crafted [...]
I recently spent the night at a friend’s house, and since I’m almost always the first to get up in the morning I killed a few hours raiding his library. After browsing the shelves of anthologies, journals, and short story collections–several of which were wayward sons and daughters from my own library–I settled on Story [...]
While riding a commuter train from Chicago to St. Louis earlier today (the train being a new addition to my annual Christmas migration back to my hometown) I read The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson, which claims that creativity, while to some extent random, can be harnessed and directed by recognizing certain qualities about its [...]
By Tom Franklin I learned a lot at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One thing I learned, for example, is that apparently everyone–at some point in their writing career–will meet and like Tom Franklin. Whether they interviewed him for an article, heard him at a conference, or met him as a visiting writer, the guy’s name [...]
This one was so tonally divergent from what I’ve been reading that it took me awhile to wrap my mind around it, but I ultimately decided that the book succeeds on a variety of levels. The plot seems familiar at first–high school running back that’s long on talent but short on brains deals with the [...]
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