More on: Book Reviews

Obviously, autobiographical experience, even matched to extraordinary artfulness, cannot be the lone standard against which to measure the accomplishment of a novel.

James Chapin on prison literature’s long moment—a review of books by Albert Woodfox, Tayari Jones, Zachary Lazar, Rachel Kushner, and Jackie Wang.

Katie Ford’s collection If You Have to Go was in steady rotation for me. I would finish another book, then go back and reread Ford.

We say we come in peace for all mankind, but we are actually warriors, killers, contaminated by something malign and grievous. But still we come.

I did read a few books published in the last thirty years. Most of them bored me to tears. A few, however, were so odd or stupid or, here and there, brilliant that I had to take notice. I was not able to dismiss them, as I would probably have preferred to do.

The novel’s decline in importance relative to the memoir and the personal essay may be one of the major literary trends of the past thirty years, but it remains the most important form for me.

I want a little mystery. I don’t want to hear the obvious stated, even if I agree. I want to be awed.

Night at the Fiestas: Stories Kirstin Valdez Quade W.W. Norton & Company, 2015 The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead: Stories Chanelle Benz Ecco: HarperCollins, 2017 The Whole Beautiful World: Stories Melissa Kuipers Brindle & Glass, 2017 HOW DO YOU IMAGINE GOD? I ask my students, and they say, as a father, a…

This Is the Ritual: Stories Rob Doyle Bloomsbury, 2017 The Things We Do That Make No Sense: Stories Adam Schuitema Northern Illinois University Press, 2017 ONE OF THE MOST STUBBORN MYTHS of modernity is the notion that religion is something you believe rather than something that you do. Religion as a “belief system” was the…

Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) The Book of Endings, Leslie Harrison (University of Akron Press, 2017) In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) WHAT CAN POETRY DO that other genres cannot? What makes it unique among the arts? What territory, however small, can poetry…