“But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her…
Tag: book review
Provocative as in to provoke, as in to provoke interest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation I greatly enjoyed Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, although I toiled through the first seventy pages or so and I started writing a very different review…
*Note: This review has been updated (as of 1/25/2020) to reflect the controversy surrounding the author and her depiction of the migrant experience, a story that she arguably had little right to tell. I failed to consider this information when I wrote my review, but I am including it now after several people (thank you!)…
TEN years ago I volunteered as an English as a Foreign Language tutor for a refugee resettlement agency in central Pennsylvania. During that time I worked with a Christian Karen family from south-eastern Myanmar*: father, mother, and their nine month old son who had been born in the U.S. One day a week, after I…
In a spin on Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Booker-Prize winning author Ian McEwan has created a world in which a cockroach has transitioned into a man, and this man has the control of the British government. We meet the cockroach/human after he has already awakened in the body of what is the Prime Minister of…
Recently, BookBrowse sent me a copy of a short story collection by “one of America’s best kept secrets”: Lucia Berlin’s Evening In Paradise: More Stories. Berlin evokes Shirley Jackson (minus the gothic vibes) and Raymond Carver in these twenty-two stories. Most of the stories are indeed short, some are almost vignettes, which I think is…