A Book of Uncommon Prayer
Reading Log favorite Matthew Vollmer edited this particular anthology, an artifact that began as a personal writing project and expanded to include the work of many writers. Everything in here…
Next Door Lived a Girl
First off, this is an extremely graphic book. There is sexual abuse and violence directed at children, and it is dark and extremely graphic. If you are sensitive to that…
Relatability, Misery Porn, and Denis Johnson’s “The Laughing Monsters”
Denis Johnson’s latest novel is dark. This is not uncharted territory for the man, but the bleakness here is obliterating. There is a detached and passive depression in the…
Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask” and the problem with ironic distance
Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask is very funny. It’s also sufficiently dark and morbid. And it lacks something that I can’t seem to define, so I don’t think it’s really…
Reading Log: ‘Barrelhouse 13: Comedy’ or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ephemeral
I have a hard time with pop culture. Specifically, I have a hard time with intellectually rigorous examination of pop culture, because it always seems like too much thought is…
Reading Log: Herta Müller’s ‘Nadirs’ and the Value of Juxtaposition in Bleakness
This is a very well-written book. In a series of short stories that bookend a much longer novella, the author presents her oppressive life as a young girl in a…
Reading Log: Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine
Well, now I’m all out of Thom Jones books. Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine is the last of Jones’s three published works. He’s got a couple loose stories…
Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”
I love short story collections. Whenever possible, I try to read a story (or a collection) by any given author before I take on one of their novels. The unique…