ACE Publications

Washington Post // In Hanuman's Hands by Cheeni Rao

2009-07-05T09:57:00.001-05:00

IN HANUMAN'S HANDS

By Cheeni Rao

Harper. 399 pp. $25.99

A descendant of generations of Brahmin priests, Cheeni Rao chose a tragic path to enlightenment. "Drugs gave me the power to hear the divine in the way my ancestors had," he writes. His powerful memoir, "In Hanuman's Hands," describes in harrowing detail Rao's troubles with crack addiction and the spiritual awakening that led to his recovery.

As a university student in Chicago, Rao embraced drugs, sex and crime. In one heartbreaking scene, his grandmother catches him doing cocaine in her bathroom: "It's a new kind of snuff," he tells her, "just like what Grandfather used." His family eventually abandons him. At the depths of his despair, while high on crack in an alley, Rao is visited by the spirit of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, who shows him the way toward a cure. "After my family disowned me over the phone, tears and pleading replaced by the tough-love click," Rao recalls, "it was Hanuman who held me in the alley and told me I wasn't alone." Rao's encounter with the divine elicits a new respect for the Indian stories of his youth; the tales held dear by his ancestors and immediate family inspire him to reexamine his poor choices. It's little wonder Rao, who eventually graduated from the University of Chicago and the venerable Iowa Writers' Workshop, has become such a great storyteller in his own right.

Miami Herald // The Show that Smells by Derek McCormack

2009-07-05T09:53:00.002-05:00

Dreams of a vampire carnival with freaky fashions in 'The Show that Smells'

The Show that Smells. Derek McCormack. Akashic. 110 pages. $15.95 in paper.

This thoroughly hilarious, strange and altogether ghoulish little freak show of a book is a campy vampire story with more in common, aesthetically speaking, with William Gay'sTwilight than with Stephenie Meyer's. Even the author's note in the beginning provides a good, dark-humor laugh in setting the record straight about a famous perfume called Shocking! created by the surrealism-inspired fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937. ''This book is a work of fiction,'' McCormack warns us. ``It is a parody. It is a phantasmagoria. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Elsa Schiaparelli was never a vampire. Shocking! by Schiaparelli never contained blood.''

Shocking! indeed. There's not much of a plot, but isn't linear narrative overrated anyway? Instead, we get something that reads more like a combination of prose poetry and avant-garde drama in which people stand around in a hall of mirrors having witty conversations, most of them riotously funny. The cast of characters includes someone named Derek McCormack, as well as the yodeling singer Jimmie Rogers, Joan Crawford, Lon Chaney and Coco Chanel. Schiaparelli plays the villain. ''Couturiers whispered her name in terrified tones,'' says Coco Chanel of her. ''She was a legend, a figure feared but seldom seen -- a Satanic seamstress who catered to vampires.'' And: ``She started creating clothes for human clients. Even the names of her collections curdled my Christian soul.''

Schiaparelli is apparently designing a ''Carnival Collection'' of haute couture -- or ''Haute horreur!'' -- for the discerning sideshow freak. Among her minions are Larry the Lobster Boy, Pinny the Human Pincushion and a trusty embroiderer named Otto the Octopus Man.

Chanel's most famous perfume is one of the many smells of the title. Lon Chaney in particular, however, has a serious aversion to it. ''Worse than wolfsbane. Gruesomer than garlic. Chaney clutches his throat like he's strangling himself. All vampires act like silent stars.'' When someone spills some on him, it ``burns like battery acid. Blended with bleach. Skin smokes. Seared hair. Seared skin. Seared seersucker. Stinks. Chaney No. 5.''

Be warned: The book is not only hilarious but grotesque. Schiaparelli dreams of a vampire carnival where she will ''pinken popcorn with baby blood'' and ``prizes will be dolls -- dead babies stuffed with sawdust.''

The Show that Smells is the 10th book in the Little House on the Bowery series edited by the great Dennis Cooper, an author and editor whose impact on American letters has not yet been fully felt in the mainstream. Most of the books he has chosen so far for this series, like Trinie Dalton's Wide-Eyed and Travis Jeppesen's Victims, will rock your world in unexpected ways.

A book like The Show that Smells -- not that there are many books like it -- reminds us that much of our most eviscerating contemporary literature is coming courtesy of the small, indie and university presses. It demonstrates that innovative literature, if such a thing still exists, can be accessible and even fun, especially for those of us with a dark sense of humor.

Washington Post // Larry's Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose

2009-06-28T11:58:00.004-05:00

Who Needs One?

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Larry's Kidney

By Daniel Asa Rose. 305 pp. $25.99

"Larry's Kidney," a stranger-than-fiction memoir by Daniel Asa Rose, serves as an enjoyable testament to the lengths to which we sometimes go to help family, even when doing so is a terrible, terrible idea. The absurdly long subtitle -- "Being the Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant -- and Save His Life" -- should come with a spoiler alert. It's not giving too much away to reveal that the plot involves a guy named Larry, who somehow persuaded his long-lost cousin, Daniel Rose, editor of the literary magazine the Reading Room, to leave his wife and kids behind and accompany him to China. There Larry hoped to get an illegal kidney transplant and meet his bride-to-be.

The ensuing adventure is the stuff of slapstick comedy, as Rose and Larry navigate the Chinese black market, the dodgy medical establishment and their own relationship. It's curious and occasionally tense, especially when after all that trouble Larry threatens to call off the operation if it's going to be too expensive. Though their odyssey was a success in the end, Rose makes the moral of the story clear: "Don't try to go to China for a kidney. We got the last one."

6/17/09: A blog about bioethics called this "another favorable--and utterly amoral--book review."

Washington Post // The Dangerous World of Butterflies by Peter Laufer

2009-06-28T11:55:00.002-05:00

A Delicate Subject

Sunday, May 24, 2009

THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES

The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists

By Peter Laufer

Lyons Press. 271 pp. $24.95

"To me," Peter Laufer writes early in "The Dangerous World of Butterflies," "journalism is an all-or-nothing calling. A real journalist is a journalist to the grave." But even the toughest reporters can get worn out. Laufer, the author of many hard-edged books -- about the rise of neo-Nazism, vigilantes on the Mexican-American border and, more recently, the suffering of soldiers returning from Iraq -- has decided to take on a more lighthearted subject: butterflies. He begins his sally in Nicaragua, where he learns of a conflict between the "butterfly huggers" of the North American Butterfly Association and the International Butterfly Breeders Association over the staged release of butterflies at public events. His investigation reveals a sordid underworld of butterfly hobbyists in which "nefarious collectors fuel criminal butterfly poachers worldwide."

Laufer writes with humor, as if to concede that he's trying too hard to find an exciting story where one doesn't exist. Nevertheless, his book is charming and his attention to detail, combined with a real gift for describing these fascinating characters -- like calling entomologist Arthur Shapiro "an endless litany of intriguing butterfly stories" -- made me want to read everything else he has written. And I'm certain to look differently at the butterflies in my own backyard, knowing now how far they may have traveled to get there.

6/28/09: Republished in the Miami Herald.

Miami Herald // Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

2009-06-28T11:53:00.002-05:00

Well I've fallen a little behind in posting my book reviews.

6/28/09

NOBODY MOVE. Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 192 pages. $22.

Denis Johnson had no easy task in following up his sprawling, National Book Award-winning Vietnam epicTree of Smoke. But the same could have been said about his story collection Jesus' Son, a bona fide American classic that has inspired more young fictioneers than any other book since On the Road.He has, to date, written 10 works of fiction, several poetry collections, and even a play.

Nobody Move appears to take its title from the reggae song Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt by Yellowman. That's an unlikely soundtrack to a story about a barbershop harmony singer named Jimmy Luntz who has run up too many gambling debts and gets taken for a ride through south-central California by a thug named Gambol. Instead of accepting the beating he deserves, Luntz shoots Gambol in the leg and spends the rest of the book on the run. Along the way, he meets a beautiful woman named Anita, who has her own share of problems. She's a hard drinker involved in a scheme to steal several million dollars. She and Luntz make a good team.

Gambol recovers from his gunshot with the help of Mary, the ex-wife of his boss, Juarez. Mary is an Army vet with a habit of stealing medical supplies. Her care for Gambol involves all of the therapeutic exercises you might expect from a story that originally appeared in Playboy magazine. In many ways, these are all classic Denis Johnson characters.

Many of Johnson's books appear to inhabit the same universe, as if each title is another piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the subject of which -- maybe the effects of war on the home front? -- is still taking shape. Longtime admirers of Johnson's work, who tend to be somewhat obsessive, will spot a few themes that placeNobody Moves squarely in that context. It is set after 9/11, and the Gulf Wars exist in the story's subtext. Gambol, who is of the mind to nuke ''that whole Muslim desert to glass,'' becomes distraught when he learns that Juarez might be of Middle Eastern descent.

Little of the snappy dialogue can be quoted at length in a family newspaper. And given the spare, made-for-glossy-serialization tone of the book, Johnson's poetic range doesn't find its fullest expression, but there are the occasional passages of utterly perfect prose. ``Luntz's vision turned a brilliant brown, then a mellow purple, then a beautiful color he'd never seen before in which he had everything he needed and all the time in the world to decide what came next. He gripped the wrists of the hands that were choking him and removed the hands as easily as if he were taking off a sports jacket.''

Even if Nobody Moves lacks the obvious gravitas and emotional resonance of Johnson's best books, its hardboiled, tough-as-railroad-spikes tone is likely to find an enormous audience. It reads like a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen, a cross between Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men. There's certainly enough going on here to feed the jones of Johnson's legion devotees.

Philadelphia Inquirer // New Collected Poems by George Oppen

2009-04-29T11:44:00.004-05:00

My review ran in today's Philly Inquirer.I'm guessing it's the first review of George Oppen to cite Ol' Dirty Bastard. The book comes with a CD of Oppen reading his own work.

And the recordings of Oppen reading his own poems are exhilarating. You'll want to follow along in the book. His voice sounds like a combination of Woody Allen and James Mason, and he swings a little bit, placing the accents and stresses in places we never expect. I'd recommend loading this CD into your iPod - somewhere between Ol' Dirty Bastard and Otis Redding - and allowing Oppen to shuffle in the background the next time you're hosting a dinner party or planning a socialist uprising.

Tayari Jones has chosen me as one of her "Amazing Eight"

2009-04-27T14:18:00.002-05:00

I'm extremely honored & flattered & humbled to be included among the "Amazing Eight," part of a series about debut books that Tayari Jones is doing on her blog. That's just so cool.

In addition to being incredibly good-looking, what do these eight writers have in common? Well, for one thing, they are all members of this blog community. But the real thing, the news, the thing that calls for champagne is that all of them are publishing their first books! (You may notice that one of the Amazing Eight is pictured twice. That's because Dwayne Betts is publishing TWO first books this year, with his bad self.)
Over the next few weeks, each of these amazing first-timers will be featured on the blog. I'll post a little about their books and they will each share something about writing and the writing life.

Ninth Letter // Podcast of "The Snotgreen Sea"

2009-04-27T14:09:00.002-05:00

It turns out that Jodee Stanley and my pals over at Ninth Letter have made a podcast of an essay I published there. "The Snotgreen Sea" is about St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. You can hear it here.

Miami Herald // Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

2009-04-05T10:09:00.004-05:00

Here's a review that got rejected by The Believer, but the Miami Herald was nice enough to run (after some much needed editing). My editor there, the great Connie Ogle, has an excellent blog that I'd like you to see.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Wells Tower. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 240 pages. $24.
The best stories in this sparkling debut collection employ a sort of emotional bait and switch. Tower's language is so precise, so funny, that you'll find yourself laughing and then, after some reflection, come to realize that the situation isn't actually all that amusing.

The Brown Coast opens with: ''Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants.'' These sentences appeal to many different emotions in a short span of time. Despite the obvious and too-easy potty humor -- or maybe because of it -- the rhetoric here is extremely smoove. (There's no better way to describe this book than "smoove.'')

There are nine stories here, and had the subtitle With Love and Squalor not already been used by J.D. Salinger, it would have been appropriate for any of them. The prose often flip-flops over a sentence or two from hilarious to melancholy and back again. On the surface, these stories are about less-than-sympathetic characters who drink too much (Retreat, The Brown Coast), suffer through disintegrating marriages (Down through the Valley, The Brown Coast again), and try to make nice with horrendously difficult stepparents (Leopard, Executors of Important Energies). Tower's ability to hint at things below the surface accounts for the immense joy these stories bring.

In Down through the Valley, a man named Ed agrees to make a long drive to an ashram where his estranged wife and daughter are living with a creepy-ager named Barry. Barry has injured his ankle and can't drive himself home. Their roadtrip is, understandably, rife with tension and petty jealousies. ''You can't sit in a little Datsun car with your wife's new lover,'' Tower writes, ''without recollecting all the nice old junk about her that you'd do better not to haul up.'' The journey, not surprisingly, doesn't end well.

The best story here is Retreat, about a man who invites his music-therapist brother to visit the remote mountain he wants to develop into a series of homes for lonely, single men. A heartbreaking aside about the brother's efforts to care for an elderly, bladder-compromised collie concludes with the notion that "it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside, hand-juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you'd flock to for lessons on how to be less out-your-mind.''

This image might be terribly sad, but we can't help laughing. And then we feel bad for laughing and start to wonder if just maybe we're terrible human beings for finding something amusing about the awful situations these poor characters (and sometimes their pets) are in. We're awkward and uncomfortable, and yet we're still laughing. I can't tell if these stories are tragic or comic, but what makes Tower's writing so impressive is that in all cases it insists on the both/and instead of the either/or.

Miami Herald // Low Boy by John Wray

2009-03-15T08:22:00.001-05:00

My review of John Wray's excellent new novel appears in today's Miami Herald.

Review | Mad teen's subway solutions

BY ANDREW ERVIN
LOWBOY. John Wray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 258 pages. $25.
John Wray's third novel, one of the most anticipated books of the spring, has the makings of an American classic. Lowboy also represents Wray's arrival as a major author, even though the story is in many ways a conventional one in which the hero of modest means sets out into the world with an enormous task, encounters a number of obstacles, comes to some new realization about his condition and finds a degree of redemption in the end.

What distinguishes Wray's novel is the formal decision to tell his story from a perspective that closely mimics the paranoid-schizophrenia of his 16-year-old protagonist William Heller. Heller is as troubled as Ishmael (who went to sea in Moby-Dick, you will recall, as a ``substitute for pistol and ball''), as precocious as Holden Caulfield, and as invisible to some extent as the unnamed, underground-dwelling narrator of Ralph Ellison's masterpiece.

Heller got the nickname Lowboy, in part, because of his fascination with the New York City subway system. He spends his days hurtling through the maze of tunnels. The story begins on a particular November day, one in which the world is going to end, thanks to global warming. William has come to believe that only a reduction in his own body temperature can prevent the Earth's immediate destruction and that having sex is the only way he can cool down enough to prevent the imminent overheating of the world. To that end, he goes in search of his friend Emily.

The chapters alternate between his wayward adventures and his mother Violet's efforts to find William before he can harm himself or others. William has a history of violence, including a previous run-in with Emily that didn't end well and spent some time in an institution. ``Big beautiful brownskinned nurses who blew kisses at you while they kicked your ass. What kind of school is this I said. What kind of study. It's summerschool William they said. Take a look outside! I went to the window and saw high cottony clouds and yellow leaves and my own face and sailboats on the river. I saw everything I was supposed to see. I see everything I said to them.''

Precisely why Heller now prefers to be underground remains a mystery, though his mother believes it's because that's where he feels safest. Whatever the reason, Heller becomes a tragically believable character. His mental illness, which Wray renders with perfect precision, infects the reader's thought processes for the duration of this fast-paced novel. The prose makes us feel the way Heller feels, and the boy's schizophrenia also feels strangely familiar. Is he sitting in for our entire, short-attention-spanned society?

Wray's genius as a storyteller lies in the fact that he recognizes that schizophrenia may well be the prevailing logic of the Twittered, Facebook-friended, RSS-fed culture around us. We can sympathize with Heller, and even love him, because he is all of us.

New York Times Book Review // Canvey Island by James Runcie

2009-01-04T09:03:00.003-06:00

My review of Canvey Island appears in today's NYTBR.

"The Swedish Mirror" in Mythtym (PictureBox Books)

2008-12-28T11:48:00.005-06:00

A couple days ago I got my contributor copies of Mythtym, an amazing anthology edited by the ever-so-awesome Trinie Dalton. It's a collection of the zines she has put together over the past few years. I have a short story titled "The Swedish Mirror" in there. Were you so inclined, you could score a copy here.

Interview magazine did a nice little write-up of the book:

The bulk of the book is an original entry, "Mirror Horror," of which the centerpiece is Dalton's essay about a collection of film stills in which women gaze in a mirror before they are killed. Therein she links Snow White to 15th-century witchcraft, discussing the mirror as both "the bane of feminine existence ... where self-criticism and loathing fester" and also something mutable and empowering.

There's a good preview of Mythtym here.

Philadelphia Inquirer // Alphabet by Ron Silliman

2008-12-01T16:55:00.004-06:00

My review of Alphabet by Ron Silliman ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday. It read, in part:

Narrative implies progress, indeed. With a book like The Alphabet, as with, say, Finnegans Wake, the point isn't to get somewhere, to complete - or in some way consume - the text, but rather to revel in the journey it provides. To enjoy the ride. While any thousand-plus-page book may at first appear daunting, reading these 26 poems will require little more concentration than staring out the window of the SEPTA R3 local on your way to work, watching the stations roll past: Wallingford, Swarthmore, Morton, Secane.

I also reviewed Silliman's previous book for the Inky, and that got reprinted here.

Update 12/23: Silliman mentioned this review in an interview on Word Riot. Is he accusing me of plagiarism? Kind of seems like it, but I'm not sure. I've never read the intro he mentions:

RS: The presumption that I'm a "difficult poet." I was pleased the other day when Andrew Ervin reviewed The Alphabet for The Philadelphia Inquirer and said reading my work was no more difficult than looking out of the window of a SEPTA train here in Philly. It's a trope that Ervin borrowed (sans attribution I would note) from Barrett Watten's original introduction to Tjanting in 1981, when Watten argued that a "bus ride is better than most art." It's good to see that some people are getting it, that you can just read what's there and that will tell you everything you need to know about my work.

I'm reminded of this 7/17/66 letter to the New York Times Book Review:

To the Editor:

In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name "Genghis Cohen" from a novel of his to use in a novel of mine, The Crying of Lot 49. Mr. Gary is totally in error. I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gary really believes himself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely, perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.

Thomas Pynchon,
New York City.

Update 12/24: Silliman made this nice comment on his blog:

Ervin dropped me a note when this appeared on the Word Riot site to say that he had not seen the 1981 edition of Tjanting & had come upon the transit trope independently. Given how long that edition was out of print before Salt reissued the book in 2002 (with a different Watten introduction taken from the early drafts of The Grand Piano), Ervin’s correction makes sense. I am intrigued – and pleased – by the parallel, given that they’re descriptions of different books more than a quarter century apart. Hopefully one could say of both, as Watten concluded his first intro to Tjanting, “It is possible, in fact, to read this book on the bus.”

update

2008-11-16T11:11:00.003-06:00

Since my last post: New town. New job. Book deal. Hurricane Gustav. 10 days w/o electricity. Denver. DFW RIP. My wife returned from a 10-week professorship in Illinois. Phillies World Series. Rain delay. Phillies World Series. Read at LSU with Hank Lazer. Short stories pending in 2 publications. Book reviews pending with NYTBR, Philly Inquirer, The Believer. Off to New Orleans this weekend.

The Believer // Awesome by Jack Pendarvis

2008-08-29T10:09:00.004-05:00

The Sept. issue of The Believer includes my review of Jack Pendarvis's novel Awesome. It also contains another great essay by Ander Monson, whose book Neck Deep is pretty much required reading as far as I'm concerned.

Here's what my long weekend looks like:

My New Job: Southern Review Resident Scholar

2008-07-14T16:40:00.003-05:00

I'm delighted to report that today I signed the contract for my new job, the first ever Southern Review Resident Scholar.

In a few weeks, I'll move down to Baton Rouge. The 2-year gig entails 20 hours/week working for the stately Southern Review and teaching a creative writing class each semester at LSU. I'm thrilled to go to work for such an amazing journal.

Louisiana, here I come.

Los Angeles Times // The Pathseeker by Imre Kertész

2008-06-15T11:00:00.002-05:00

My review of the newly translated Imre Kertész novella appears in today's LA Times.

It's amazing what a Nobel Prize will do for an author's career. Imre Kertész's profound and puzzling novella, "The Pathseeker," has finally arrived in English, 30 years after its initial publication in Hungary. In it, a man known only as "the commissioner" travels, along with his wife, to some unnamed Mitteleuropa seaside resort. He decides to take a detour along the way to make some inquiries about an old, unresolved case that involved "the part of universal evil that falls to our lot." Or, it's equally possible that the detour was the point of the vacation all along.

The Believer // Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

2008-06-01T07:48:00.003-05:00

I reviewed a fascinating debut novel for the June issue of The Believer.

Amazon listing for MYTHTYM

2008-05-22T10:40:00.002-05:00

The Amazon listing is up for MYTHTYM, an anthology edited by Trinie Dalton. It's due out in December and will contain my short story "The Swedish Mirror."

San Francisco Chronicle // Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

2008-05-22T10:28:00.003-05:00

My review ran in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Chuck Palahniuk appreciates more than anybody else writing today the dark matter that holds our world together. Like the great Kurt Vonnegut in his heyday, he writes sentences so outwardly simple that, were it not for the boldness and clarity of his creative vision, they could easily congeal into schlock-heavy pulp fiction. Palahniuk revels in exposing the moral and psychic fault lines of our society. He writes about the ugly underbelly of contemporary life, but in Palahniukland - which is our land, only amplified well beyond the point of distortion - the seedy underbelly is all that's left.

Miami Herald // The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

2008-05-13T14:42:00.003-05:00

My review ran in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Hemon's extensive research results in a beautifully rendered reevaluation of a previously misunderstand chapter in the history of immigration to America -- which is say, into the history of America itself. Like the fiction of Ha Jin fiction or Chris Abani, Hemon's best work describes and defines what it means to be a new citizen in this land. Books like The Lazarus Project should make us glad he's here.

Signing Books at the Printer's Row Book Fair

2008-04-30T11:10:00.003-05:00

On Saturday June 7, I'll be signing copies of Chicago Noir (Akashic Books, 2005) at the Printer's Row Book Fair. Not sure of the exact time yet, but it will be something like 2 or 3 o'clock. My pals and fellow contributors Amy Sayre-Roberts and Bayo Ojikutu will be there as well.

Update 5/14: We'll be at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tent from 3:30-4 on Saturday June 7.

"Self-Portrait" makes Notable Stories list

2008-04-30T11:02:00.005-05:00

So it turns out that my "Self-Portrait" made the Million Writers Award: Notable Stories of 2007 list at StorySouth. I'm grateful to all involved.

Washington Post Book World // 5 Memoirs

2008-04-27T09:03:00.004-05:00

I reviewed five memoirs for today's Post:

Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i by Susanna Moore
Greetings from Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor
Kinky Gazpacho by Lori L. Tharps
A Long Retreat by Andrew Krivak
Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari

Philadelphia Inquirer // Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

2008-04-10T08:00:00.002-05:00

My review is here.

Few authors today so accurately get at the heart of what makes us tick. Despite the beautiful exactitude of the prose, and the fluid turns of phrase that remind us how elastic the English language truly is, reading Wolff can be a little disconcerting - in a good way. In his fiction, Wolff fully exposes the good, bad, and ugly about what it means to be alive in this day and age.