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Recent Reviews
Margaret Atwood
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Margaret Atwood's latest story collection, Stone Mattress, is subtitled 'Nine Tales' to signal its interest in the folkloric, the macabre and the supernatural ... Running throughout all of this is the fantastically dark comedy of old age ...book starts with three interlaced stories about long-estranged lovers and rivals who met in Toronto's early '60s bohemian sector ... The stories have the caustic wit, giddy deviance and propulsion of high-quality pulp, along with the probing interiority and flinty insights of Atwood's novels ... Not every story is a triumph, and a few pet words, phrases and jokes ought to have been iced on second appearance.
Jennifer Egan
Mixed Minneapolis Star Tribune It's a winning, adventuresome whole but with some underperforming parts. There are too many reveries in which characters recount overfamiliar sorrows. And with such a variety of people, eras and settings Egan edges toward shorthand: The punk club is wild and debauched in the way we'd expect, the ritzy suburb bigoted and antiseptic in another unsurprising way. These complaints come infrequently, however, and recede with the accretion of the book's themes -- the biggest one being no less than time itself. Some of these characters are in midlife, yes, but the crisis Egan's looking at is permanent, the one we're always in the middle of, at least till time -- 'a goon,' says one of the book's creaky rockers -- cues our exit. It's a bleak book, but also wise, witty and inventive.
David Hajdu
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books Love for Sale is a sweeping but casual book ... it doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive, but it does touch on most major developments in how pop music has been produced and consumed in the United States from the 1890s through the present ... Hajdu is writing with the general reader in mind...But even the sort of people who file their doo-wop 45s by region ought to learn something from Love for Sale, and Hajdu’s affinity for a range of genres lend even the more familiar stories the dimensionality of a stereo mix ... Hajdu has good ears and ideas, so one wishes he would more frequently delve deeper into a record; as it is, his analysis sometimes seems incomplete.
Colson Whitehead
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune Over its first 60 pages, Whitehead’s new book, The Underground Railroad, seems to be a more traditional historical novel. It’s instead a successful amalgam: a realistically imagined slave narrative and a crafty allegory; a tense adventure tale and a meditation on America’s defining values.
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Mixed The Los Angeles Review of Books Culling from specialized publications, mainstream journalism, and author interviews, Kirschenbaum recaptures the excitement and optimism writers often felt in the face of this magical new technology...Beyond the ken of Kirschenbaum’s study are questions of how word processing affected the style of individual writers who transitioned from earlier methods of composing and revising, or how it has affected literary style more generally. He cites the work of scholars who’ve done important work in that dauntingly broad area, but, on this matter and others, he’s chary about sweeping summation and loose speculation.
Rick Moody
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune Moving from barbed, brokenhearted cleverness and playful conceits to genuine pathos is an oft-attempted but very difficult trick. The transition here is never complete; but close. Along with laughs and some tedium, there are several moving, hollowed-out mediations here.