Category: Reviews

Perhaps the greatest magic trick performed in Not on Fire, Only Dying, the elegant and gritty debut from Susan Rukeyser, is its improbable blend of elegance and grit. Literary fiction disguised as a crime novel—or is it the other way around?—Rukeyser’s New Yorkers are not the irony-addicted denizens of coffee shops and gentrified walk-ups who have peopled so much contemporary literature set in the city.

A House Made of Stars, the first novel by Tawnysha Greene, depicts two young sisters who, like many—if not most—pairs of young sisters, live entirely at the mercy of their parents.

A financial crisis and a government Ponzi scheme have left parts of America in very different stages of collapse in The Heart Goes Last, the latest novel from Margaret Atwood. Out west, things are all right. The northeast has taken a bigger financial hit, and characters Stan and Charmaine have lost their house and are living out of their car and eating stale donuts. Stan keeps the key in the ignition at all times in order to make a quick getaway if the car is assailed by gangs or rapists in the night. The young married couple rightly wishes to escape these circumstances by any means necessary; heading west is out of the question, they believe.

When my wife and I moved to North Carolina from Arkansas, our one-year-old daughter was teething. Our older daughter, four, rode with me, while our screaming younger daughter rode behind us in my wife’s car. I was driving a Ryder truck, pulling my car, and by the time I add up these details, whoever is listening is either laughing (men), or wearing a pained, concerned look (women). Some of the men will apologize for laughing—these are the fathers.

Eddie Lanning, the titular character of Lot Boy, Greg Shemkovitz’s debut novel, is a slacker doing menial work at his father’s car dealership. He spends most of his time verbally brawling with the mechanics, shirking his responsibilities, and ranting against his lot in life. Another dealership reprobate, Spanky, convinces Eddie to step up his amateur stolen parts operation.

Norman Lock’s novel American Meteor is comprised of the first-person deathbed account of Stephen Moran, whose invented life spans the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries, and includes encounters with many of the great men of the era. He narrates the loss of his eye while fighting for the Union in the Civil war; his subsequent role escorting Abraham Lincoln’s corpse aboard a funeral train, cross-country; a career working for the railroad baron Thomas Durant; a career as a photographer; and encounters with George Custer, Crazy Horse, and Walt Whitman

The prose in Cyn Vargas’s debut collection, On the Way, has a casual, unforced power. Whether suffering through a parent’s disappearance in Guatemala or a vicious haircut on Division Avenue, her characters speak to the reader with an appealing frankness, confessing the most difficult aspects of their histories with a welcome, ironic sense of humor. “The kids were used to me not having any new clothes, or new Trapper Keepers, or those fancy juice boxes that weren’t really boxes at all,” explains the narrator of “Then It’s Over.” “They almost expected me to get a bad haircut, too.”

The narrative of Chris Cander’s new novel, Whisper Hollow, spans half a century of life in a small town in West Virginia, from 1916 to 1969. Its focus is on two women, Alta and Myrthen, who as young adults are swiftly caught up in less-than-ideal marriages. Alta resigns herself to an unfulfilling but stable domestic life; Myrthen retreats into religious devotion, and later resorts to drastic measures to free herself from her circumstances.