Though I tend to have difficulty in talking with the concision this space requires about story collections—not that you need to know my problems—in some ways that mirrors the difficulties and perils of short-form fiction. Both practitioners and non-practitioners (novelists) alike point out the rigor and
Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel Mr. Shivers (Orbit) made its way into the scrum of books that have taken over the room where I sleep. I am not aware of anything previously written by Bennett or what prompted me to procure the book from his publisher. Or, over this past
Of our planet’s largest species I understand why the whale receives more attention than the elephant. The Megaptera Novaeangliae, after all, has Herman Melville to once and forever create a metaphor and narrative to enchant homo sapiens while we busily eradicate big mammals from our ecosphere. Pachyderms have no
A number of Canadian authors of my acquaintance—Gil Adamson, Wayne Johnstonand, Michael Ondaatje—have sung the praises of Newfoundlandian writer Lisa Moore (Alligator). Now comes her second novel, February (Black Cat), and I am pleased to report I can see that the awards and accolades are justified. Based on
My temptation to refer to Lee Eisenberg’s (The Number) career as “storied” was tempered by a sudden echo of George Orwell’s famous “Politics and the English Language,” in which he proscribed, “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in
There was a time in the mid-’90s when I found myself interviewing a long skein of Roddys, Patricks, Colums, and Seamusi (sic)—I reached the scientifically indefensible but understandable conclusion that there was a storytelling gene and these Irish lads were disproportionately gifted with it. Young Trevor Byrne’s
Since 2005, Scottish publisher Canongate has been building The Myths, a series of books matching well-regarded authors from all over the globe—Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Salley Vickers,
When it was first published, who would have expected (least of all Rupert Murdoch, who owns the publishing house) that A People’s History of the United States of America: 1492-Present (Harper Collins) would sell over a million copies. When I spoke with Howard Zinn in 2003, during one
Short fiction is on my mind today. Michigan mortician turned writer/poet Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade), whose family business most certainly has allowed him to view life from a most unusual perspective, has a new opus, Apparition & Late Fictions, his first venture into
Nick Tosches’s restless curiosity trods a wide literary terrain, and his formidable talents cross boundaries and barriers that might restrain lesser minds. He has written extraordinary (and perhaps definitive) profiles of Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire and Dean Martin in Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams
