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Category: Fiction

  • Love And Fire Children: Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here

    I don’t know why it’s the late spring of 1995 when Nothing to See Here begins. Perhaps it’s because it’s a time blessedly free of cell phones and texting and the narrative complications they introduce. Maybe it’s because politics had a few more norms such that a main character who is a senator could imagine →

  • The Great War Book Party

    November 11 is Armistice Day, the day in 1918 when the fighting in what was then known as The Great War, came to a stop. It took until June 28, 1919 for the Treaty of Versailles to be signed, which means that we are only just now coming to the end of centennial observances. But →

  • Into the Woods in Elmet

    You might expect that there’d be a little bit of Beowulf in a book by a medieval studies scholar in York, England. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel adds some Heathcliff, too, for a touch of Yorkshire Moors gothic. But even if you can spot the forbears in Elmet, you probably won’t suspect what you’re getting in →

  • Long Loves in a Small Coastal Town: A Review of In West Mills

    De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel begins with an arresting scene. Pratt Shepherd is in the middle of a fight with his free-spirited girlfriend in a small, coastal North Carolina town on the eve of World War 2. However, Azalea ‘Knot’ Centre, a sometime teacher at the local school for African-American children, is nobody’s possession. When →

  • Dr. Livingstone? Don’t Presume: Bringing the Bones Out of Africa

    Even when I was a child in the 1960s and 70s there was still some adventurer’s romance attached to the words of Henry Stanley upon finding his quarry: Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Despite the flood of newly independent African nations in that era, people could still be heard referring to Africa as “the dark continent” →

  • The Not-So-Calm Before the Storm: Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina Story

    Katrina doesn’t arrive until Salvage the Bones is almost over, but the hurricane has always been coming. She broods over the whole of Jesmyn Ward’s epic 2011 novel, even when the only one who seems to know she’s on the way is Esch’s Daddy, whose preparations seem excessive to his four children living with him →

  • Getting Beyond ‘Should’ to What ‘Is’: The Virginia Reeves Interview Concludes

    My interview with Virginia Reeves, author of The Behavior of Love, concludes with some thoughts on ‘should’ and the struggles of human beings in love to connect. (The interview begins here.) One of the other big words in this book for me is the word ‘should.’ In fact, you title a whole section ‘Should.’ I →

  • “Behavior is a Fraction of Who We Are”: Virginia Reeves Interview (2 of 3)

    In the previous segment of our interview with Virginia Reeves, we talked about the origins of her new book, The Behavior of Love, and the inspiration for one of its main characters, Ed, a behaviorist working within a Montana institution. In the second part of the interview we discuss behavior, identity, and the windows of →

  • Not Fixated on the Future: Finding Presence with Virginia Reeves (1 of 3)

    Virginia Reeves is a confounding author. How does someone who can capture the beauty of landscape and human relationships with such rich writing also manage to resist the expectations of what books about such things must be like? Just when you think you know how her stories will go, when you’ve seen the end of →

  • Why Reading About Burundi is Reading About Humanity

    “I hope you can understand why it is that despite all its faults and its legacy of violence, I so very much love my country and my culture. It is an amazingly rich, vibrant, and active way of life. So, it is possible that in one country you can find such extremes as genocide and →