Category Archives: Books

Another week, another handful of pieces up at Vol.1. I’ve started off a semi-regular zine review column with a look at issues of Womanimalistic and Pins & Needles. Paquita’s style here favors ornately drawn and arranged pages featuring both illustrations and test. This issue opens with a long, illustrated meditation on love, and lovers, with … Continue reading →

A week after seeing him read, I finished reading Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe earlier today. It’s a relatively short novel, and throughout it, Yu navigates a divide between what’s essentially an extended metaphor and a time travel storyline that’s satisfying on its own terms. And he pretty much … Continue reading →

Sunday night found me in Greenpoint, taking in the first installment of the Wold Newton reading series at WORD. Reading were Brian Francis Slattery,  Jonathan Berger, and Charles Yu, and hosts Edward Champion and Eric Rosenfield performed some bits between the readers that could, I daresay, be called ‘vaudevillian.’ All of the readings impressed — … Continue reading →

Recently translated into English and published in the US by Melville House, Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew is a densely written, temporally-shifting narrative. I reviewed it for Vol.1 earlier this week. Vennemann’s structure here evokes panic — and even more so, it evokes a very shared panic, multiple minds each flying off in different directions, … Continue reading →

Last year, I saw Lindsay Hunter read twice. The first time was at The Slipper Room as part of the Dollar Store Show’s summer tour; there, she read a story called “Meat From a Meat Man.” The title, I daresay, is pretty self-explanatory. The story is terrific. The second time was in Chicago as part … Continue reading →

So hey, there’s a collection of short stories that came out a few years ago that I read recently and quite enjoyed. It’s called Russian Lover; the author’s name is Jana Martin, and I have some thoughts on it up at Vol.1. Martin is comfortable in a variety of milieus, from the fringes of academia … Continue reading →

Aaron Burch wrote a short, strange, beguiling book called How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew. And in the new edition of Word Riot, I have a review of it. Aaron Burch has arrangement on his mind. Biology and lineage and anatomy all fill the pages of this collection, some sparsely, some … Continue reading →

Up now at Flavorwire: ten capsule reviews of novels and collections, past and present, that take different pulp traditions to interesting places. There’s a reason that acclaimed authors of literary fiction, from Borges to Atwood, from Houellebecq to Moody, find resonance in the pulp tradition. Detective stories, science fiction, and tales of horror can inform … Continue reading →

Newly up at The Rumpus, a conversation with Ben Greenman. Which is, in some ways, a followup to an earlier conversation with the writer in question. You mean how much reality has to be in unreality? I’d say that it has to be mostly real: what is extraordinary about those locations, about those times and … Continue reading →

In brief: I’ve just finished Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal. And it’s quite good — the sort of book that opens suggesting it’ll be one thing and rapidly becomes something very different, a narrative that seems straightforward at first giving way to something much more fragmented. I don’t want to go into … Continue reading →

Up now at Vol.1: some thoughts on Mary Hamilton’s chapbook We know what we are, its ties to NBC’s late-eighties comedy lineup, and its relationship to the coverage of inspirational sports movies.