Check out my review of Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale, an ensorcelling novel limning memory’s many mysteries. Here’s an excerpt of my review:
When you think of it, your past is like your shadow, and your shadow, whether it’s following you or running ahead, away from you, is, nevertheless, attached. Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale is as much an exploration of the interstices between fantasy and reality—that space where those two zones collide, no, overlap: the place Morrow describes as the “realm for which there were no logical words”—as it is a flashlight on one flawed but resilient woman’s road to independence. Morrow charts the ways in which that woman’s shadowy past, whether dragging from behind or nagging before her, must be addressed, while realizing that though the addressing may not result in triumph over the past, it may lead to a kind of reconciliation with it. The Diviner’s Tale seems like a response to Robert Graves’s admonition in “Sick Love” to “Walk between dark and dark—a shining space / With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”
My Review of Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale
My Review of Robert Steiner’s Negative Space
Check out my review of Robert Steiner’s Negative Space, a poignant portrait of one man’s emotional disintegration, at Rain Taxi: Review of Books, Online Edition: Winter 2010/2011. Here’s an excerpt:
Negative Space is a portrait of paralysis, a study of stasis, an analysis of the anguish felt by the abandoned. Though the prose is, like the narrator’s postmortem, interminable, it’s still pleasurable, forcing us to follow its twists and turns toward some kind of understanding about what may ultimately be incomprehensible and irresolvable. Taking its title from a term in the artist’s lexicon, which defines the space around and between an image’s subject, the novella explores the space surrounding betrayal, that space moving in and out of focus, often becoming the primary focus, as if it were a version of Rubin’s vase, that famous optical illusion where the vase is supplanted by two faces staring at each other. In fact, this book might have been subtitled “Toward a Syntax of Figure-Ground Reversal,” to be placed on the shelf alongside Steiner’s critical work, Toward a Grammar of Abstraction.
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Tagged John Madera, Negative Space, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Robert Steiner
Review of Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley
Check out my review of Davies’s spectacular debut novel at the Brooklyn Rail. Here’s an excerpt from it:
Jeremy M. Davies’s Rose Alley is a film buff’s, no, cosmopolitan’s, no, epicurean’s, no, literary aesthete’s guide to late ’60s Paris; and it’s a kind of loving homage to unfinished films, their reverberations of nostalgia, memory, and obsession; but it’s also a novel where dizzying erudition is set in counterpoint with comic set-pieces, where robust language, mediated by a penetrating understanding of character, takes over every page (there are even expansive extrapolations on etymologies). There’s a buoyancy to the style here and an easy abandonment of straightforward storytelling, resulting in a beautiful prose object, that is, a story told “in the best possible way.”
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Tagged Jeremy M. Davies, John Madera, Rose Alley, The Brooklyn Rail
New Fiction Published!
“Spectral Confessions and Other Digressions,” my blurb for an imaginary book, has been published in The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Cow Heavy Books), alongside work by Stephanie Barber, Ken Baumann, Matt Bell, Aimee Bender, Blake Butler, Teresa Carmody, Brian Alan Carr, Alexandra Chasin, Irene Ruiz Dascal, Susan Daitch, Jeremy M. Davies, Craig Dworkin, Brian Evenson, Camellia Freeman, Adam Golaski, Elizabeth Graver, Amelia Gray, Evelyn Hampton, Sean Higgins, Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, David Hollander, Gregory Howard, Laird Hunt, Greg Hunter, Shelley Jackson, Harold Jaffe, Jac Jemc, Shane Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Lee Klein, Evan Lavender-Smith, Todd Lerew, Samuel Ligon, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, John Madera, Jess Malmed, Peter Markus, Michael Martone, Stephen Matanle, Ben Mirov, Warren Motte, David Ohle, Lance Olsen, Derek Pell, Tom Phillips, Vanessa Place, Brian Reed, Mallory Rice, Tom Roberge, Adam Robinson, Kevin Sampsell, Davis Schneiderman, Brittani Sonnenberg, Lynne Tillman, J. A. Tyler, Jane Unrue, Diane Williams, Tristram Q. Wing, Joseph Young, and Mike Young.
