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My short story, “Sunsets in Sunny Gardens,” has now appeared in the latest I-70 Review. Thanks to Gary, Maryfrances, Jan and Greg for accepting it. I received my copy in the mail this week and it looks fantastic. The story opens:
My review of Bad Faith by Ted Wheeler has gone live over at Necessary Fiction. A bit: Most of the characters in Bad Faith aren’t nice, and Wheeler plumbs that not-niceness throughout. The Pythagoreans talked of good as definite and finite, and evil and indefinite and infinite. Niceness may make for a slogan, and a friendly face to provide […]
My review of the essential Seeing Red by Lina Meruane has been published over at the Colorado Review. An excerpt: One evening in New York, Lina Meruane’s body “seize[s] up” and leaves her “paralyzed, [her] sweaty hands clutching at the air.” Just as she reaches to her purse to pick up an insulin shot, a […]
My review of Colson Whitehead’s absolutely brilliant new novel, The Underground Railroad, has appeared over at The Millions. Read the review if you’d like. Or better, go buy the book.
Go read something by Dana Spiotta. You can’t go wrong. I’d recommend Stone Arabia or her newest, Innocents and Others. Otherwise, what you’ve been reading about Zero K is pretty much spot on, but the best novel of the year—which I am reviewing soon—might just be Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.
Ars Technica discusses its impressions of WatchOS 3, and how it may finally make the Apple Watch live up to its promise: WatchOS 3 has the benefit of a year or so of actual user data behind it, and it shows. Apple had ideas about how people might or should use the watch, and now […]
This Thursday, June 2, I’ll be on NET Radio’s All About Books talking about what makes One Book One Lincoln selection Being Mortal by Atul Gawande so great. Such as bits like this bit, talking about the author’s father: One of his proudest days was July 4, 1976, the country’s bicentennial, when he was made an American citizen […]
As I’ve been mostly working on fiction lately, I’ve not been as active in my book reviewing. But I’ve still been reading—of course—so I thought I might make it a regular part of this blog to round-up some of the better books I’ve come across. The bulk of my reading lately has been as a committee […]
That master of the short story, Anton Chekhov, once noted that a writer was not “a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer,” but rather, Chekhov said, the writer was somebody who had “a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty.” One wonders perhaps what Chekhov would have made of a writer who […]
The new issue of Anomaly Lit, featuring my story “The Thing Speaks For Itself,” just came out, and it looks fantastic. “Thing Speaks” is an older story that I reworked a bit before submitting to Anomaly, reworking some sections that had previously never quite felt right. It’s a bleak little piece, but from the tenor […]