Category: Reviews

Reviewed by Robert Long Foreman                       Crash Course, Robin Black

Reviewed by Raphael Maurice                       I’m from Electric Peak, Bud

Reviewed by Robert Long Foreman   The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat, Amelia Martens Sarabande

Travis Mulhauser’s debut novel, Sweetgirl, is a harrowing, cinematic tour de force set in the desolate woods of Northern Michigan. Percy James, a teenage girl and the protagonist, somehow manages to hold her moral center in a world ripped apart by generational poverty and rampant addiction, a world where it’s all too easy and all too common to make terrible decisions.

Early on in Jarrett Kobek’s indictment of Silicon Valley, social media, white men, dynastic wealth, the Global War on Terror and false outrage, he writes, “Almost all movies are better than books. Most books are quite bad. Like this one. This is a bad novel.”

With a flip through Age of Blight, the new collection of short stories by Kristine Ong Muslim, one of the first things a reader notices is the images: strange, black and white photographs. One also notices that the stories are very short, most spanning fewer than ten pages. What one might not notice upon a simple flip-through is how carefully chosen each element of this book is, and how each works together to maximize the reader’s experience.

New Poetry from the Midwest, Eds. Okla Elliott and Hannah Stephenson
New American Press
ISBN: 978-1941561010
$15.95, 254 pages

Over the past decade, the migration of literary discussion to the internet has erased many of the distinctions between traditional criticism and what used to be thought of as “book blogging.” Many of the early bloggers now do a great deal of their writing for established print publications like Bookforum and The Times Literary Supplement, while most, if not all, of the traditional print venues for criticism have a significant online presence—that is, if they haven’t moved online entirely. The end result is a compromise; book bloggers have achieved a wider platform for their work, and the mainstream publications receive a much-needed injection of energy.