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The title of this debut novel by Wendy Jones, The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals, suggests a fun, light, old-fashioned read, which it partly is. But it also deals with serious, timeless subjects, though the resolution reflects the time wherein the novel takes place: 1924, in the small Welsh town of Narberth. Continue reading “The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price Purveyor of Superior Funerals”

Writing history is hard. Writing good history? Even harder.

Writing good history implies a fair treatment of one’s source materials, a readability of the narrative, and a clear voice. Juggling these three demands is difficult, to say the least. Writing history involves understanding the trade-offs between these three components. Different types of histories show different balances, and when one component is weighed over another, a different type a history emerges. Academic histories tend to favor attention to source material and detailed footnotes. Popular histories rely on readability. Memoir-infused histories blend present and past as the author’s own connections frame how stories are told. Even when given the same set of events, there are many ways to write about those events and many ways to write it well. Refusing to pick a specific frame, however, leaves loose threads in the historical narrative—threads that snarl and knot, distracting the reader from the author’s purpose. Continue reading “Coolie Woman”

Writing history is hard. Writing good history? Even harder.

Writing good history implies a fair treatment of one’s source materials, a readability of the narrative, and a clear voice. Juggling these three demands is difficult, to say the least. Writing history involves understanding the trade-offs between these three components. Different types of histories show different balances, and when one component is weighed over another, a different type a history emerges. Academic histories tend to favor attention to source material and detailed footnotes. Popular histories rely on readability. Memoir-infused histories blend present and past as the author’s own connections frame how stories are told. Even when given the same set of events, there are many ways to write about those events and many ways to write it well. Refusing to pick a specific frame, however, leaves loose threads in the historical narrative—threads that snarl and knot, distracting the reader from the author’s purpose. Continue reading “Coolie Woman”

There are 1.2 billion Indians today, and the fertility rate for an Indian woman of childbearing age is 2.59. So, Indians must be having a lot of sex. Ah, but if only sex were all about copulation. How can India produce the Kama Sutra, venerate literal reproductions of the phallus, and yet, as a society, hold seemingly regressive attitudes about sex and women’s sexuality? In The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys through Modern India, British journalist and freelance writer Sally Howard asks this question that has been previously expounded upon by historians, academics and hippies hibernating in Goa. What she brings to this debate is a fresh perspective, new voices and a judgment-free approach to 21st century India’s attitudes about sex, sexuality, women’s lib, kink, sex work, and romantic love. Continue reading “The Kama Sutra Diaries”

The ten stories that make up Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations are compelling and unsettling, and feature female protagonists who are themselves unsettled. Some are predictably unsettled by men, husbands and love interests while others are entirely misfit within their lives, within their worlds. Many of the characters are reeling from a recent loss—of a job, or a relationship, or of innocence itself. Continue reading “American Innovations”

Amid the ever-increasing number of short-form anthologies, Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms attempts to distinguish itself through comprehensiveness. As the unwieldy subtitle demonstrates, all genres, modes, centuries, and nationalities are fair game and the only limitation is that the piece be “fewer than 1250 words.” Continue reading “Short”

Laressa Dickey’s first full-length collection, Bottomland, portrays a familiar American landscape with a deeply private undercurrent. Pastoral images and their inhabitants play a central role in the journey, but they keep their secrets. Continue reading “Bottomland”

Robert Root begins Happenstance by explaining his plan for the memoir: “to write about one hundred days of my childhood in the next one hundred days of my age, to capture one hundred recollections of the past over one hundred days of the future.” On the eleventh day, however, his father died, and Root shelved the project for four years, until one of his creative writing students told the story about the chance meeting of his parents, prompted by a fly ball at a summer softball game. Haunted by the realization that numerous instances of happenstance had conspired to create this event, Root resumed researching family records, photo albums, and items he identifies as “literary remains.” The result is not so much a nonfiction narrative, as he writes in a guest blog post on Michael J. Steinberg’s site, but “the prose equivalent of a medieval polyptych, a multi-paneled altarpiece, especially since it is also full of photographs.” Continue reading “Happenstance”

Some narrative poetry unfolds with loops of discursive detail, painting moments or scenes with long sighs of description. Not Beverly Burch’s work: these narratives hum with an electric attention to words. Poem after poem in How a Mirage Works centers on the kind of ‘mirages’ familiar to any of us, such as memory or our changing identities in life. Yet even when imbued with melancholy, the pace and language of these poems create worlds that crackle with a surprising suspense. Continue reading “How a Mirage Works”

After discovering she is pregnant, the most famous mother in Greek mythology prophetically admits being “scared.” In Richard Matturro’s inevitable and absorbing Medea, she has every reason to be. Her troubles began long before the births—and deaths—of her twin sons. The Princess of Colchis (located in the Caucasus Mountains on the eastern edge of the Black Sea) is a practicing witch who lost everything helping her future husband Jason steal the Golden Fleece from her father King Aeëtes.
Continue reading “Medea”

Phoning Home is a collection of essays by Jacob Appel, a prolific writer whose achievements in other disciplines such as medicine and bioethics provide him with a distinctive writer’s voice and acuity. The essays span the writer’s professional and personal lives, each adding depth and perception to the other. Essays on Appel’s Jewish heritage and family are at once poignant, witty and insightful. In “Mr. Odd and Mr. Even,” Appel profiles his maternal and paternal grandfathers, both in many ways polar opposites—one, a conformist and the other, someone who “made a point of sticking his neck out as far as his tiny, rounded shoulders would permit.” Who he should take after, Appel wonders. The rule breaker or the follower? In presenting their life stories in parallel, Appel marvels over the pull and push of familial bonds that mold us into who we are today. Continue reading “Phoning Home”

The loaded title of Bianca Stone’s debut collection, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, carries the weight of the marriage-industrial complex on its shoulders. The modern wedding is a complex maze of consumerism, family tradition, and DIY design. But this book isn’t about weddings or bridesmaids. It’s about lovers discovering the space of a long-term relationship, and the poems vibrate when they touch on the tension between self-love and love for another self. Continue reading “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows”

Termination Dust is the fitting title of Susanna J. Mishler’s first collection of poems. As this Alaska-based poet describes in a poem, “termination dust” is the name locals use for the first snowfall in autumn: it names the meeting point between seasons, and suggests an essential ending and beginning. Moments of such meeting-grounds—between humans, between the human and the wild—are key elements throughout the wide-ranging poems of this striking collection. Continue reading “Termination Dust”

The first biography since her death in 2004, Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber, gives a straightforward account of a very complex life. Sontag graduated high school at fifteen, married at seventeen, earned a BA from the University of Chicago at eighteen, had a son at nineteen, and was divorced at twenty-five. Sontag left the academic world, not completing a doctorate, as she explained, in order to explore the world intellectually on her own terms. She was a novelist, cultural critic, filmmaker, stage director, playwright, and political activist. She became an international pop icon and intellectual celebrity. She wrote about photography, illness, human rights, AIDS, media, minority rights, and liberal politics. When doctors told her twice she had cancers that were rarely survivable, she survived by her own efforts to find new treatments. Continue reading “Susan Sontag”

After reading the title, I had a feeling that The Deportation of Wopper Barraza would be about someone named Wopper Barraza who, for some reason, was deported from the United States. (Clearly, astute powers of deduction were at work.) However, after the first few chapters, I wasn’t sure whether or not we would be following Wopper or if he would be a symbolic figure since the early chapters aren’t actually told from Wopper’s perspective. What soon became clear was that the narrative structure of the novel was going to be an experimental, often playful, journey through the minds of people affected by Wopper’s deportation, including, at times, Wopper, himself. What I originally thought could be a clunky narrative style quickly proved to be a delightful, multi-dimensional foray into the immigration experience from both sides of the Mexican-American border. Continue reading “The Deportation of Wopper Barraza”

Bad Things never choose their location. A storm’s path is traceable but its final destination can be wider and more destructive than projected. Earthquakes, tsunamis and twisters strike without warning.

Humans cause Bad Things too. The real-life event that connects the stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s unsettling What Happened Here is the kind of Bad Thing that receives attention when it occurs, on anniversaries, and when something equally terrible happens. In 1978, Pacific Southwest Flight 182 collided with a private Cessna plane over the San Diego neighborhood of North Park. The Cessna’s pilot failed to inform air traffic control of their course change, the other pilot was unable to see the other plane on the radar, and air traffic control ignored the alarm that the planes were heading toward each other. The result: 137 people from both planes were killed, seven died on the ground with nine more injured and 22 homes destroyed. It remains the deadliest air disaster in California history. Continue reading “What Happened Here”

There are a few things that make A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies feel like a modern fairytale: its decidedly lyrical verse, the pithy unseen narrators, and the fanciful notions of people dropping dead upon seeing one of the most beautiful women to ever live. The structure of the novel, however, is what lends the book most to this form. As is common with fairytales, perhaps because they seem to follow a particular formula, the reader knows, more or less, what is going to happen before it even begins. A moody fellow, who is moody and whose name is actually Moody Fellow, does indeed find love and then die. Moody begins as someone with a rather naïve impression of love: “One thing Moody was sure of, though, from books: love always brought out the best in people. Poor Moody. He really wasn’t cut out for the world as we know it.” Continue reading “A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies”

Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat is nothing like the usual cat book. Takashi Hiraide is an acclaimed poet in Japan, and this novel resembles a poem, recreating the immense world in small images, opening up to life with love and loss. It’s short like a poem, but though nostalgic and moving, it is not sentimental. The end of The Guest Cat indicates this novel evolved as a reshaping of a collection of essays and journal notes about the narrator and his wife’s relationship with a neighborhood cat Chibi, meaning “little one” in Japanese. This is a quiet, reflective, even philosophical book, which can appeal to more than cat lovers, since it is about how a relationship can change a person, how a communal animal can make one question who owns the animal, and how loss can reveal not just grief but resentment. By the end of The Guest Cat, the narrator notices and loves more, even extending his love to a house he doesn’t own. Continue reading “The Guest Cat”

Four lines into the opening poem “The Bread” from Jeffrey Bean’s award-winning new chapbook Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, the speaker recounts the defining experience of his life: sitting down at a restaurant table with a girl. Doling out description with subtle music that captures the slowly evolving intimacy of the situation, the stanza quite literally sets the table for the flash of love’s bittersweet onset that occurs in the stanza’s final line. While the straightforward description of the scene details the outward circumstance of the meeting, the allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” captures the true scope of the meeting’s importance:

The bread, the salad, simple, oiled.
The coats on hooks, exhaling winter smoke.
The hand that was mine, the knuckles, the table, smooth oak.
The girl I’d come to meet, the sky behind her hair, shook foil.

Continue reading “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”