At a late point in Daniel Woodrell’s new novel The Death of Sweet Mister, Shug, an overweight, 13 year old boy, finds his father’s blood-filled boot in the sink. He knows his father is dead, and he immediately begins to clean up signs of the …
There is a popular dictum on the children’s program Sesame Street that “asking questions is a great way to find things out.” Whenever one of public broadcasting’s flagship Muppets or moppets faces a seemingly insoluble conundrum, one of the older, wiser characters invariably exhorts them …
Unlike the stock detail of William Gay’s Provinces of Night, which wears its Southerness like a Confederate flag iron-on decal, And Venus Is Blue emanates The South as a region and a place where people live and things go on with or without a genuine …
A man nearing the end of a murderous quest — to hunt down and kill his wife’s lover — pauses on the brink of action. He can carry out the plan he’s made, he realizes, but what will he do then? He is “at the …
In the beginning was The Well… While Katie Hafner doesn’t begin the story of “the seminal online community” this biblically, her tale of The Well is nothing less than a creation myth. Woven into her account of visionary — and not so visionary — businessmen …
If poetry volumes were ranked like ski slopes, I’d list Mary Jo Bang’s The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans as a black diamond: it’s not for the poetry beginner. Bang has some exquisite lines, and if you like associative poetry, you’ll adore her. …
Despite the odd fact that Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway have both been tagged with the term “realistic writer,” both write as if they are more concerned with style and form than any kind of fidelity to experience as actually lived by living, breathing people. …
As a rule, authors’ first books are rarely their strongest. Think of Faulkner, Dickens, and Morrison. Think of Jane Austen and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in his later years, sought out copies of his first book so that he could burn …
The easy thing to say about this sometimes gut-wrenching trip through the underside of the nation’s fast-food industry is that once you’re done you’ll think twice before strolling into McDonald’s or one of its numerous cohorts. Well, it’s easy to say, but it may not …
Reading Arts of the Possible will convince you (if you weren’t already convinced) that Adrienne Rich is the kind of thinker who has long term relationships with her ideas. Written over a span of three decades, the essays in this collection return again and again …