Recommended Reading
Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Reviewed by Lauren Starnes, WLU ’12 Charles Frazier’s haunting new novel, Nightwoods paints a poignant portrait of love and survival in the unforgiving North Carolina Mountains. Rather than the nineteenth-century setting of his previous novels, Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, Frazier sets this tale in … Continue reading
Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco (Pittsburgh, 2012) Scene: pile of recent poetry volumes, all surely deserving fond attention. Bleary reviewer browses one for a while, sighs, puts it down, and repeats this behavior with several more. After … Continue reading
Waking by Ron Rash
Waking by Ron Rash (Hub City Press, 2011) Reviewed by Philip Belcher Since I first read “Under Jocassee” in Ron Rash’s 2002 collection Raising the Dead and followed the speaker’s urging to look beneath my boat and into … Continue reading
The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets: A Self-Help Memoir
The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets: A Self-Help Memoir by Jeffrey Skinner (Sarabande) When I first glanced at this book, I was ready to dismiss it: I don’t care for contemporary memoirs of many sorts, litbiz as a subject … Continue reading
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (New York Rev. Books, 1999). The current revival of A High Wind in Jamaica encourages me to believe that we haven’t devolved to a state in which all novels about young … Continue reading
The Accident by Mihail Sebastian
Anca L. Szilágyi The Accident, by Mihail Sebastian, trans. Stephen Henighan (Biblioasis, 2011) What gets imprinted upon a work of fiction when society is unraveling all around the writer? This is a question I grappled with while reading Mihail Sebastian’s … Continue reading
Outlaws to the left of me, outlaws to the right of me . . . .
The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell (Little, Brown) The first two Daniel Woodrell novels I read were engaging but discomfiting portraits of redneck miscreants which never fully satisfied because Woodrell is inclined to let his Ozark characters at important moments … Continue reading
Two Guns for Vengeance?
Two Guns for Vengeance (Jove, 2011) by J. R. Roberts While preparing my reading list for a course on the Western novel, I began to consider what to say about the kinds of books we won’t examine in the class. … Continue reading