May 23, 2013
Subscribe RSS Feed

‘Harvard Square’ by André Aciman

Posted on May 20, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

André Aciman’s new novel, Harvard Square (W. W. Norton & Company), a story of two young men trying to come to terms with their outsider status in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been receiving a lot of buzz about its timeliness in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. But it’s the timelessness of the book’s themes—assimilation, finding one’s place in the world, deciding who you want joining you there—that will make it a novel worthy of discussion and admiration for many years to come. (more…)

‘The Summer We Got Free’ by Mia McKenzie

Posted on May 15, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

If you are reader of Mia McKenzie’s blog, Black Girl Dangerous, you already know, and you’re probably already excited to read The Summer We Got Free, Mia McKenzie’s debut novel. For those of you who do not know, you are about to be introduced. (more…)

‘Relative Stranger’ by Barbara Treat Williams

Posted on May 9, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

In Relative Stranger, Starr Spenser returns home to Portico Ferry, Missouri, after being cast off by her Las Vegas lover, Alana. Starr is fed up with the hijinks of her father, a man who thinks robbing a bank to pay off a mob debt is perfectly acceptable behavior. Starr strikes out for her childhood home. When she arrives at the bed & breakfast owned by her father’s ex-wife, Letisha, she finds that Letisha’s mental capacity is somewhat questionable. Her memory seems diminished and her loyal housekeeper is deeply concerned. To make matters worse, Leitisha is dating a cad of a man at best and a scam artist who has designs on her money at worst. His ill feelings for Starr are evident every time he speaks to her, but Starr holds her tongue as she tries to figure out the situation. If that were the only problem Starr had to contend with, it would be a cakewalk, but that’s far from the only issue she’s got to plow through upon arrival in town. (more…)

‘The Fainting Room’ by Sarah Pemberton Strong

Posted on April 28, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

“Mister, I need a cup of strong coffee with an even stronger shot of bourbon in it. I need a cigarette that doesn’t taste like poison. I need a clue. I need a lot of things that I don’t have.”

–Detective Slade

What happens when you throw a lonely, blue-haired sixteen-year-old nihilist with a pet iguana, a tattooed former circus-performer cum manicurist, and a wealthy architect into one household for a summer? In Sarah Pemberton Strong’s deft hands, you get one hell of a good read. (more…)

‘The Albino Album’ by Chavisa Woods

Posted on April 14, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

It’s nearly impossible not to fall in love with the protagonist of Chavisa Woods’ first novel, The Albino Album. She may be a strange-talking runaway who fed her mother to an albino tiger, her name may be so complicated that no one ever actually utters it throughout the entire book, she may smell bad and blow up buildings, but damn she’s fabulous. Because her name is unpronounceable, everyone calls her Mya—a nickname bestowed by her first girlfriend, a possessive Russian truck driver with money to spend—and Mya is a force to be reckoned with: a ballsy, no-nonsense, straight-talker with a huge, if rough, heart.

There are many layers to The Albino Album. Mya is the central character, but the narrative sweeps out to encompass her family, her family’s friends, her lovers and her lover’s lovers, her housemates and her teachers. There are so many stories interwoven in these pages, stories of love and lust and loss, stories of cultural pillage and dispossession and hidden sexuality. Mya’s family is Middle American poor working class—called “trash” by a jilted lover, who later regrets the word—Mya’s lovers include an ex-suburban Indian woman and an intersex Malian adopted by a well-to-do New Orleans couple, and each of their stories is told with a careful and generous eye. I don’t think I’m overstating when I say The Albino Album is, at its core, a novel of the human condition. It’s a political novel. It’s a love story and a coming-of-age story. It’s the story of a girl who rides an albino horse and has no patience for the niceties of cultural conditioning. Suffice to say, it’s multifaceted, in the best possible way.

The Albino Album has a distinguishing feature: it is divided into two sections, Side One and Side Two, and the chapters are presented as Tracks, as in, the songs on a cassette tape. If a lover gave you this mix tape as a gift, you’d swoon. It’s got Lou Reed, Ani DiFranco, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Sting and David Bowie and more. And like a good mix tape, the chapters of The Albino Album function individually, but mean all the more as a whole. The chapters switch perspective and point of view, but always move forward with an eye toward connection. Mya, who has a mind for puzzles, says this to Gabriel, a teenage runaway who she forms a bond with late in the novel: “Domino effects is how things go together to make each other possible. Everything’s connected in a certain way see, but when you change the position of one thing, you change what’s possible for another thing… You can use energy too to make things happen, shape everything, un-shape things, even. Electricity, chemicals, you re-shape them, they re-shape other things. Hell, you could make an old mousetrap and rearrange a rat…” And that’s an accurate description of how the world of The Albino Album works: endlessly being remade by the actions of Mya and those she knows, in an endless rippling resonance.

The Albino Album is not easily summed up, even with a number of adjectives. It is epic, it’s sprawling, it’s laugh-out-loud, utterly brilliant, infused with philosophy and characters that practically leap off the page, it’s sexy and off-kilter. It’s a new vision of America. Seriously. This book will grab you by the throat and not let up for 550 pages and when you’re finished you’ll wish you were back in its jaws.

 

The Albino Album
By Chavisa Woods
Seven Stories Press
Paperback, 9781609804763, 560pp.
March 2013

‘A Horse Named Sorrow’ by Trebor Healey

Posted on April 7, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

“Jimmy was a song, see? And the song’s over. Let me tell you the story. You read and I’ll hum.”

So begins the poignant and haunting new novel A Horse Named Sorrow (University of Wisconsin) Press written by award-winning author Trebor Healey. In truth, the novel itself is like a literary soundtrack, each chapter is a new song that collectively and effectively underscores the bittersweet and seemingly broken life of our endearing Salinger-like protagonist Seamus Blake. (more…)

‘Nevada: A Novel’ by Imogen Binnie

Posted on April 2, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

In her debut novel Nevada (Topside Press), Imogen Binnie welds a fierce new voice in an expertly delivered narrative. (more…)

‘Shine’ by Donnelle McGee

Posted on March 26, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and all the characters in Donnelle McGee’s debut poetic prose novel seem infused with the utmost desperation. Capturing a bleak landscape of folks barely hanging on by their fingernails, McGee introduces us to a neo-realistic world of commercial sex workers, poor folks with AIDS, crooked cops, families struggling to survive abandonment and violence that is stark and emotionally raw. While its subjects and themes are sensationalistic, the treatment of his character’s lives is anything but in McGee’s assured and loving hands. Compassionate, considered, and knowing, the author uses a wide array of literary techniques to reveal the interiors and the fairly direct story of a tragedy whose foreboding conclusion appears inevitable almost from the start. (more…)

‘Spreadeagle’ by Kevin Killian

Posted on March 15, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

The acknowledgements section of Kevin Killian’s new novel, Spreadeagle, notes that much of the book’s content began its life as a series of short stories appearing in a variety of publications. For the first half of the book, this is abundantly clear—while the author effectively introduces and skewers a wide array of gay characters who are at once familiar and totally unlikeable, the initial bulk of the story feels disjointed, making it difficult to follow the plot, and hard to initially become invested in the fate of the protagonists. (more…)

‘Mundo Cruel’ by Luis Negrón

Posted on March 5, 2013 by in Fiction, Reviews

Luis Negrón’s debut story collection, Mundo Cruel, is a study in verve, sass, and voice, peppered with a dash of spirituality. Short and sweet, this slim volume delivers its wisdom in one breakneck sprint through the cosmopolitan barrio of Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Negrón’s work has garnered comparisons to Manuel Puig, the late Argentine pop author best known for his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s an apt comparison. Like Puig, Negrón’s prose crackles with the voice of the street, constructing deep meaning out of absurdity and satire. But Negrón is his own writer.
(more…)

Older Entries »