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Friday Reads: February 2015

February 20, 2015 Reviews

By ANDREW WILLIS, TYLER SAGE, JONATHAN MOODY, MARIAN CROTTY, ELEANOR STANFORD, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month we’re playing in the borderlands, exploring the spaces between categories. Intercontinental love stories; strangers in strange lands; the struggle to remain constant in a world of transience. These books bend genre and their subjects navigate the passages between success and failure, present and past, public and private life—between where they are and where they have in mind.

Recommended:

Middle Men by Jim Gavin, The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger, Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Ben Greenman, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks.

Review: Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes

January 26, 2015 Reviews

Book by KERRIN MCCADDEN
Reviewed by DARA BARNAT

Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes

Kerrin McCadden’s poignant debut collection of poetry, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, is filled with composed wisdom for how to cope with separation in general, and divorce in particular. The collection won the New Issues Poetry Prize in 2014, and McCadden’s poetry has appeared widely in Best American Poetry 2012,American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

Friday Reads: January 2015

January 16, 2015 Reviews

By ZEINA HASHEM BECK, MELODY NIXON, FRANCESCA MARCIANO, STEPHEN O’CONNOR, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

As we begin 2015, our recommenders are heading into the wilderness. These books range widely through time and space, each embracing its own unique heart of contradiction—exile and home; passion and failure; reason and chaos; doubt and confidence. Heavy with both fictional biography and memoir, we bring you familiar faces from the dark woods of alienation and obsession. Dive into the new year with these five maps by which to recognize yourself and find a path through the forest.

Recommended:

The Same Roads Back by Frank Dullaghan, The Season of Migration by Nellie Hermann, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Review: Almost Famous Women

January 13, 2015 Reviews

Book by MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN
Reviewed by KELLY FORDON

Almost Famous Women

Fans of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first short-story collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, which appeared in 2012, have been looking forward to her second collection ever since. The premise of Bergman’s new book, Almost Famous Women, is immediately intriguing. Bergman culled through the annals of history to locate women who brushed up against fame, thanks to proximity to famous people or now-forgotten accomplishments. Publisher’s Weekly commended her for this “feminist reclamation” of narratives largely ignored; a compilation of 13 fictionalized tales of women including James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia; Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind”; Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s cast-off daughter; and Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s impetuous, drug-addled, niece.

Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

January 8, 2015 Reviews

Book by RICHARD FLANAGAN
Reviewed by FRANCESCA DE ONIS

A bee
Staggers out
Of the peony.

Richard Flanagan’s new novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, begins with an enigmatic haiku by Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet, which evokes a state of sublime consummation or mortal exhaustion, in other words, how love and war, beauty and horror are inextricably entwined.

Flanagan has explored these opposites of the human condition in three previous novels, set in Van Dieman’s Land, now the island of Tasmania, off the coast of New Zealand. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the 2014 winner of the Man Booker Prize, and in Flanagan’s other work, this remote, timeless region is his equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Marquez’s Macondo, a mythic terrain in which he explores the resilience and courage of the human spirit.

Friday Reads: December 2014

December 19, 2014 Reviews

By SARAH SMARSH, IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE, STEVEN TAGLE, MACEO J. WHITAKER, JENNIFER ACKER, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month’s recommendations from The Common’s contributors and staff deal with the intersection of old and new, ancient and modern, on every level—personal, religious, political, even supernatural. Perhaps in the spirit of the season, we seem preoccupied by stories of intergenerational strife, love, and ambition. In their urgent focus on belief and truth-seeking, these books represent a literature of searching, a catalogue of quests across time and around the world.

Recommended:

To the End of June by Cris Beam, The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz, We Others by Steven Millhauser, Hum by Jamaal May, High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire.

Review: Troy, Michigan & Don’t Go Back To Sleep

December 14, 2014 Reviews

Books by WENDY S. WALTERS and TIMOTHY LIU
Reviewed by J. MAE BARIZO

Troy, MI

J. Mae Barizo reviews two poetry collections: Troy, Michigan by Wendy S. Walters and Don’t Go Back to Sleep by Timothy Liu.

TROY, MICHIGAN

Wendy S. Walter’s Troy, Michigan chronicles municipal and personal history in this elliptically elegant collection of sonnets. This book swivels gracefully through eras in the city of the title, alluding to its mythic namesake while divulging the narrator’s observations on industry, race, and the tug of the natural world. Walters spent 15 years of her childhood in Troy, which is in close proximity of Lake Huron and Lake Erie; her father worked for General Motors.

Review: Lila

December 2, 2014 Reviews

Book by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Reviewed by CHANTAL CORCORAN

Lila

“For a town, it wasn’t such a bad place,” observes Lila, a transient passing through Gilead, who ends up staying to marry an old widowed minister; she’s also the character for whom Marilynne Robinson has titled her most recent novel. Lila is Robinson’s third book to examine the lives and devotions of a small group of characters in this secluded Christian prairie town in Southwest Iowa. While each book is an independent work, shining on its own—Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and Home won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a National Book Award finalist—the overlapping narratives weave a complex tapestry of the human experience as it relates to personal faith.

Review: The Afterlife of Stars

November 17, 2014 Reviews

Book by JOSEPH KERTES
Reviewed by REBECCA CHACE

How to depict human suffering, especially that of children? This question is at the heart of Joseph Kertes’s haunting novel, The Afterlife of Stars, which tells the story of a family fleeing the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary to crush the anti-Communist revolution from the point of view of young Robert Beck, 9.8 years old but “born old,” as his Parisian aunt tells him when she meets him for the first time. Kertes, like Robert, escaped with his family across Europe and eventually settled in Canada, though he was only five at the time. Kertes, whose previous novel, Gratitude, won both the National (U.S.) and Canadian Jewish Book Awards, might have written a memoir, but writing a novel allowed him to tell this story in a lyric, dreamlike prose. This may have been the best way for this author to convey in a literary, adult voice such an early trauma.

Review: Wolf in White Van

November 3, 2014 Reviews

Book by JOHN DARNIELLE
Reviewed by OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

wolf in white van

In the early 1990s, John Darnielle set “some of his poetry to music, using a guitar he’d gotten for a few bucks at a nearby strip mall music store. His idea at the time was that eventually his day job would be ‘poet.’ …Young men have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they’re going to end up doing for a living,” says his website bio. He went on to found the popular folk-rock band, The Mountain Goats. Its fans are drawn to Darnielle’s simple instrumentals and powerful lyrics.His song “You Were Cool” sums up his approach and the band’s appeal: “This is a song with the same four chords / I use most of the time / when I’ve got something on my mind / And I don’t want to squander the moment / Trying to come up with a better way / To say what I want to say.”

Now, Darnielle has fulfilled his day-job fantasy in another way—he has written a National Book Award-nominated debut novel, Wolf in White Van. Fans of Darnielle’s music will not be disappointed. Darnielle writes in the poetic, playful tangents characteristic of his lyrics, often grasping at a passing image or emotion and describing it from every angle before rejoining the unfolding story.