About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Emme Lund
Rave The Star Tribune In spite of its genre trappings, this book is something altogether slower and more meditative than the standard fare—and all the better for it ... Readers of all races, creeds, sexual orientations and genders will recognize Owen\'s feelings of misplacement—but queer readers perhaps will find something more. Emme Lund, a transgender woman, suffuses her narrative with clear-sighted metaphors for teen alienation, though her story will likely carry particular resonance for readers who feel out of step with their bodies or genders. The Boy With a Bird in His Chest offers a much-needed corrective to the average coming-of-age fantasy, as Lund tenderly and deftly walks us through the process of making peace with the fragile animal we all carry around with us, showing us how to let it live and breathe in a hostile world.
Emme Lund
Rave The Seattle Times In spite of its genre trappings, this book is something altogether slower and more meditative than the standard fare—and all the better for it ... Readers of all races, creeds, sexual orientations and genders will recognize Owen’s feelings of misplacement—but queer readers perhaps will find something more. Lund, a transgender woman, suffuses her narrative with clearsighted metaphors for teen alienation, though her story will likely carry particular resonance for readers who feel out of step with their bodies or genders. The Boy with a Bird in His Chest offers a much-needed corrective to the average coming-of-age fantasy, as Lund tenderly and deftly walks us through the process of making peace with the fragile animal we all carry around with us, showing us how to let it live and breathe in a hostile world.
Joe Moshenska
Rave The Boston Globe ... a strange but captivating, book. The author draws his reader, not only into the life and world of his subject, but into a sort of lived experience of Milton’s approach to poetry ... While every page shows the author’s learning, reading the book is a much more meditative than scholarly experience. Moshenska does not seem overly interested in facts and figures, still less with academic hobby horses. His focus lies elsewhere—in getting to the core sensibilities of the great English poet ... Moshenska unapologetically inserts himself into Milton’s story. He spends long passages recounting details from his research trips and his own experience with Milton’s poetry, both as a teacher and reader. Just as the many languages the poet mastered bubble underneath the rhythms of his verse, so too does Moshenska’s method float freely between different literary genres, and ranges widely over disparate periods of literary history. His roundabout method yields a strange animal of a book, a sort of hybrid creature—part biography, part literary criticism, and, in those sections where we follow the author on his research trips, part travelogue. The results are stunning in their insight, and oddly lyrical.
Denis Johnson
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Questions about the work acting as a sort of end cap to Johnson’s career lurk everywhere behind the more conventional critique. However, that problem does not impugn much upon The Largesse of the Sea Maiden... To say the work is preoccupied with death makes it sound overly ponderous or dour; this is far from the case. These are gorgeous, honest, funny stories ... Part of their brilliance lay, as already mentioned, in their powerful meditation on the commonplace of defeat — in exploring the question of what death can claim and what it cannot ...these fringe-dwellers act as a sort of synecdoche for the immediacy of human experience itself. His prose telegraphs an infectious sense of nowness. It feels both urgent and untroubled ...a great collection of stories, full of humor and sadness and truth.
John Darnielle
Pan The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Universal Harvester reads similarly to his first book in many ways, marrying gothic mystery to a more modern literary style, employing a non-linear narrative with frequent switchbacks and detours. However, where Wolf in White Van shines, Mr. Darnielle’s second book feels like a failed genre experiment ... But Mr. Darnielle’s vision is never fully realized. The spaces go mostly unfilled, and the suspense is always more potential than actual. It all feels a little hollow. Mr. Darnielle relies too much on the innovations of its genre-mixing without seeming to really understand what those genres require. Much of the book’s forward momentum hinges on figuring out the puzzle of who is making these tapes, and why. But the author lingers over the characters and settings so ponderously, that by the time we understand what’s happening, this puzzle no longer seems to matter. Universal Harvester is well-written, though structurally unsound. It’s impossible to deny John Darnielle’s talent, but his execution is lacking here.