About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jac Jemc
Positive Pop Matters Jemc is a gifted writer of a certain kind of literary suspense. The stories in False Bingo are wound tight, propelling the reader to ambiguous and nerve-wracking ends ... There\'s a lot of Shirley Jackson in these stories ... Jemc\'s characters, often female, testify to a very specific embodied experience of being a woman in certain spaces.
Nell Zink
Positive PopMatters ... might have easily been a story about that time and that place, but the scope of Zink\'s work is ambitious ... very concerned with the evolving sociopolitical milieu of its characters, and at times, it reads like a greatest hits of national events since the end of the Cold War...These historical beats set the rhythm for the plot a bit stringently ... While the main characters are impeccably drawn, they can feel subservient to Zink\'s need to narrate this epoch, which she does as if she were a snarky left-of-center pundit on MSNBC, lining up the hypocrisies one by one and knocking them down ... at its best when it\'s a portrait of a family in all of its cycles of growth and maturation. Characters come and go throughout, and intrigues flare and fizzle, much like in life. Or perhaps, much like in life in the last 30 years. It feels too hard to hold a grudge in this precarious world. Maybe that\'s the lesson we carry forward.
Tim Mohr
Positive PopMatters His passion for both punk music and the city of Berlin comes through in each of Burning Down the Haus\'s many episodes, some of which have been researched down to the minute. Mohr interviewed more than 50 people, and at times, the book reads like a writer trying to whip together hours of transcribed interviews into a narrative, stuffing in everything he could get ... there\'s almost a nostalgia in Mohr\'s book for simpler times, when tyranny was orderly and bureaucratic and when antagonists (the Stasi) and their tools of oppression (stifling free expression to preserve a socialist dictatorship) were clearly defined. A time when it felt like a few contraband tapes passed between friends had the power to overthrow governments.