Good short fiction works a quite a different dimension to novels – it needs a fast denouement, and the language has to be sharper, cleaner, more exacting because of the limited space. All of this stories in this collection are complete – leaving the reader with some kind of denoument. Drewe has chosen well, and the book contains a good range of material, from the modern to the traditional, funny, serious, intense, lighthearted – funky or political.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of Merle’s Door by Ted Kerasote
In the small Wyoming town where much of this story takes place, there were no great concerns about dogs and they roamed free, able to associate with each other and with the people of the town. This worked in a community in which automobile traffic was slight and everyone knew everyone else although Kerasote describes a similar and much larger community in the French Alps where much the same canine freedom obtained.
A review of A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
But while the themes are serious, A Spot of Bother is anything but bleak, or dour. Right from the first moments of the book, there is humour. For example, when George goes to visit a Psychiatrist about his depression, he tells him he’s been taking antidepressants: “He decided not to mention the codeine and the whisky” and Dr Foreman tells him that the side-effects are “Weeping, sleeplessness and anxiety.”
A review of After Dark by Haruki Murakami
This is not a book that develops logically. It cares nothing about loose ends or impossibilities. There is another world that lurks behind and around the world we know and Murakami is disquietingly comfortable in both.
A review of The Suitors by Ben Ehrenreich
This is an amazing and a gripping novel told with virtuosity. His ability to retell that earliest of books is a splendor that constitutes an act of magic seldom matched in the literature of our time. You will do yourself an injury to miss this book.
A review of Mr. Weston’s Good Wine by T. F. Powys
Mr. Weston’s Good Wine is a wayward work. It is religious, carnal, heretical, humorous and engaging, digressive and ultimately involving. It has a complex, personal symbolism that is not reducible to any simple message. T. F. Powys’ work as a whole seems to represent one of the most rewarding byways in English literature.
A review of North River by Pete Hamill
Hamill does a stunning job in his depiction of both sophisticated and popular Irish and Italian cultures of the time. This is an absorbing novel of the old-fashioned kind with plot complexities and well-drawn characters. It will entertain and leave the reader with durably pleasant memories.
A review of Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Anthea Bell’s translation reads extremely well. She has given us an elaborate, sophisticated English prose that brings out all of Zweig’s literary art and emotional subtlety. Overall, Amok and Other Stories represents a splendid selection of Stefan Zweig’s short fiction, with the added frisson that these stories share a correspondence with the writer’s own tragic fate.
A review of Another by Joel Deane
The community of Another is a bleak one to be sure—a distopia which is all too real. Death is everywhere, and those that hurt you most are those who should be protecting you. The community is empty and disfunctional, and everyone we meet is poor, damaged, and full of ugly pain and scars. It isn’t pretty, but somehow Deane’s exquisite writing contains beauty that transcends its setting, and hope which goes beyond the unhappy ending.
A review of American Youth by Phil LaMarche
American Youth is a perfectly rendered novel which manages that difficult balance between absolute topicality—this is a novel for our times—and timeless beauty. This is both a classic piece of literature and an important chronicle of a generation desperate to get out of a downward spiral.