Darrin Doyle is quite an accomplished writer, having published two novels (Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo), a sequence of fiction (The Dark Will End the Dark), and many individual pieces in various journals over the last decade. Couple that with his diverse history of jobs (including paperboy, pizza delivery job, janitor, door-to-door salesman, telemarketer, and janitor)—as well as his experiences living around the country and teaching English in Japan—and it’s no surprise that his latest short story collection, Scoundrels Among Us, radiates a mixture of [mostly] down-to-earth situations and eloquently refined yet quite accessible language. While not every piece in it is as conclusive, eventful, and/or impactful as it could be, they’re all at least enjoyably inventive, with a few downright enthralling entries that’ll stick with you long after you’ve read them.…
...continue reading
The first work of Sheila Heti’s that I read was her book How Should a Person Be?, a novel about being an artist—or, more specifically, a novel about being a woman and an artist, and how those two things inform and sometimes resist one another. The book was extremely polarizing; some reviewers found it riveting in its experimentation, while others found its content indulgent and its lack of form irritating. I was enamored by it, as Heti has an extraordinary ability to capture the convergence of creativity and self-doubt while voicing thoughts most people believe are unsayable.
Like How Should a Person Be?, Heti’s latest novel, Motherhood, isn’t for everyone. For people who turn to books primarily for their plots, this is not the one (or the writer) for you.…
...continue reading
We’re born with a finite number of opportunities. Attrition, bad choices, misspent goodwill, and fucked-up luck. The opportunities dwindle through a process called living. Our portfolio of prospects turns into a tattered novel of outcomes. I am twenty-two.
Thus opens Where Night Stops, the latest book from American writer Douglas Light, whose story collection, Girls of Trouble, won the 2010 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. (Also, his debut, East Fifth Bliss, was turned into the film Trouble with Bliss, which starred Michael C. Hall, Brie Larson, and Peter Fonda.) Filled with tense and intriguing situations, plenty of poignant and philosophical sentiments, and an assortment of colorful—if also slightly underdeveloped—characters, the novel is a captivating psychological drama whose relentless vibrancy and pace mostly makes up for its marginally opaque and repetitious core.…
...continue reading
Amy Bloom’s latest novel, White Houses, is a work of historical fiction that recreates the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. The novel is told from Lorena’s perspective and spans decades, encompassing everything from her abusive childhood in South Dakota to her time spent living in the White House (and ultimately finds her in her elderly years). Lorena makes a witty, charismatic narrator, and her relationship with Eleanor seems built on a mutual respect for each other’s strength. As a result, White Houses is a charming and tender depiction of middle-aged love, and Bloom captures the gamut of emotions—everything from rapture to pain—that accompanies growing older with someone.
Lorena’s childhood in South Dakota informs facets of her relationship with Eleanor, and this section proves to be one of the most moving and vivid parts of the novel.…
...continue reading
There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on.…
...continue reading
I have to admit: I wasn’t planning on writing about Living the Dream when I was originally scheduling my review coverage. The book I had initially chosen to talk about this month was a darker, more “literary” pick, but with the news covering natural disasters and violent protests, I needed to immerse myself in something lighter. Instead, I chose Lauren Berry’s debut novel, and I’m so glad I did. It was such a pleasure to get lost in the lives of twenty-something Londoners as they made messes out of their careers, romantic relationships, and friendships (and tried their damnedest to clean them up.…
...continue reading
As the vocalists of Black Flag and The Misfits (among many other projects), Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig, respectively, are widely considered two of the most outspoken, manic, and/or hypermasculine figures in punk/hard rock and metal. Of course, Rollins has also established himself as an impassioned and intellectual socio-political author, actor, and radio host, but his original persona still follows him somewhat. As for Danzig, his fascinations with horror, eroticism, and the occult/theology—joined with his often-chronicled imbalanced behavior—have made him quite the interesting character.
It makes wonderfully twisted sense, then, that they’d be turned into an off-the-wall domesticated couple in Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever, an underground comic series by Tom Neely and his Igloo Tornado troupe that ran for the past decade or so.…
...continue reading