RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksRead in order, the stories have a progression, becoming increasingly at ease with themselves and their telling ... with their asides and fondness for spatial transitions, the stories in the much anticipated Tiny Love contain a bite that his novels, no matter how excellent and more seasoned, sometimes lack ... Brown’s construction of his stories is akin to moving from verse to chorus, with a rhythmic lick and kick at the end, all in a time signature familiar but with its own syncopation ... It’s a predominantly male world, but Brown describes it with enough compassion and humanity to make all those mishaps and misfortunes seem universal ... Placed at the tail-end of Tiny Love, it’s arguably the best of Brown’s uncollected work ... Taken as a whole, these previously uncollected stories illustrate Brown’s willingness to experiment with various voices and sentence construction, traveling beyond the region in which they are set to a universal place where he would be able to locate the voice one hears in his later novels ... Brown...put in the hard graft to give his stories not only the haunting honesty and straightforwardness of old-school country songs, but also had that element of unpredictability typical of more recent outsider oddball songsters like Prine, Ben Weaver, or poetic lyricist Alejandro Escovedo, whose work Brown would champion toward the end of his life.
Colin Asher
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books...[a] well-written and scrupulously researched biography ... Though he paints his portrait with a broad brush, Asher’s book is enjoyable not simply because it shows how Algren plied his trade or reacted to the world around him, but due to the little things Asher notes in passing ... Equally interesting, since Algren had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the truth, is the way Asher triangulates different versions of a given event, such as the discrepancies he notes between Algren’s and de Beauvoir’s accounts of her last Chicago visit; the result is a reasonable approximation of the truth ... One can only hope that efforts of remembrance like Never a Lovely So Real will help to return the author’s star to the literary firmament where it belongs.
Robin Robertson
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksRobin Robertson is the latest in this line of generic bedfellows ... considerably more modern, complex, political, and, though cinematic, probably less filmable than March’s narratives ... despite its peregrinations in time, place, and rhythm, Robertson’s poem, when it comes to its inner workings, is also surprisingly novelistic ... Though the poem’s diffuseness tends to lessen its visceral impact, The Long Take remains a remarkable work.
Robin Robertson
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"And indeed, although The Long Take is definitely a poem, I can’t think of anything quite like it ... Though the poem’s diffuseness tends to lessen its visceral impact, The Long Take remains a remarkable work. An occasional phrase may be out of sync with the era, like \'watching each other’s back\' or \'getting totalled,\' and there are moments when the poem, introduced by a map of old Bunker Hill, reads like a tourist guide to the city’s noir hot spots. But, for the most part, Robertson gets it right, his language functional and often exquisite ... The Long Take/em> seems like a poem that’s long been waiting to be written.\
