Those familiar with Donald Antrim’s whimsical, feverishly cerebral novels should brace themselves: There are no postmodern flights of fancy to be found in his memoir. The Afterlife is a grounded and, well, sober attempt to make peace with the legacy of his mother’s debilitating alcoholism, which had reached “operatically suicidal” proportions by Antrim’s thirteenth birthday.
Read More"I don't want anyone to die in my stories anymore," begins a story in David Means's previous collection, Assorted Fire Events. It's an arresting moment, when Means wipes off the greasepaint and squints in the klieg lights, laying bare his intentions—or his plaintive wish.
Read MoreIn 1939, wondering how Russia would react to the expanding war, Winston Churchill memorably stated: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. This is an apt description of Hystopia, David Means’s long-awaited novel about Vietnam.
Read MoreThat a chemist figures prominently in Andrea Barrett’s new novel, The Air We Breathe, will come as no surprise to those familiar with her fiction. Over the past decade, Barrett has produced a novel and two story collections that dramatize an abiding fascination with scientists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century milieus.
Read MoreIt's not often that someone grabs you by the lapels and tells you that you must, absolutely must read a particular book. Not in my experience anyway. Usually my friends' recommendations come with their fair share of disclaimers and qualifications, the sort of hedging we all engage in simply because we know that one person's dog-eared treasure is another's doorstop.
Read MoreDaphne Beal’s first book might be considered an exemplar of what Edmund White recently characterized as the “Peace Corps novel,” in which a “young, privileged American” travels to another country and is transformed by the experience. “I wanted to come home different from what I’d been—bolder, wiser, happier,” insists the narrator of In the Land of No Right Angles, recounting her peregrinations through Nepal and India.
Read MoreBeginning with the publication in 1979 of her startling debut, Lithium for Medea, Kate Braverman has produced a daring body of work that strips bare the myth of glitzy Los Angeles to expose its decidedly unglamorous underbelly. Like the dystopian fiction of Nathanael West and John Fante, Braverman's short stories and novels dramatize the plight of outcasts straddling fault lines, one step from ruin.
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