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By Eric Markowsky, on December 16th, 2011 Author: Joan Leegant
2010, W.W. Norton & Co.
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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| Language..... |
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Wherever You Go is set primarily in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, though it focuses on the lives of three Americans with complicated relationships with Judaism. Yona wants to reconnect with her extremely devout sister; Greenglass, once saved from a life of drugs by religion, is suffering a crisis of faith; and Aaron aims to prove to his father and the rest of the world that he is a worthy son of the Holy Land.
Each of the individual narratives works well enough at first, but they never come together in any sort of a satisfying way. When the strands do begin to intertwine, about two thirds of the way through the book, their interactions seem more convenient than anything else, providing the characters with contrived opportunities to bring their stories to some kind of closure.
For me, the biggest disappointment was the failure to make the most of the setting. Wherever You Go does very little to evoke any kind of a textured world or to convey any sense of what makes Jerusalem and the rest of Israel unique. People eat falafel and cucumber and tomato salad. Most of the Israelis are “from central casting.” It’s very hot. That’s about it. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on December 14th, 2011 All in all, 2011 was a pretty good year for poetry. Not only did a poet win this year’s Nobel Prize for literature (way to go Tomas Transtromer), not only did this year’s National Book Award for Poetry winner give an awesome acceptance speech (really well done, Nikky Finney), but a bunch of my favorite poets all published new books to boot, including Dean Young, Billy Collins, Adam Zagajewski, Stephen Dunn, and Derek Walcott.
Below, you’ll a find a few more reasons to celebrate some of the
Best New Poetry of 2011
.
 Collected Body, by Valzhyna Mort
Last year, I ended my “Best Poetry of 2010” post by looking to the future. I wanted to plug Valzhna’s Mort’s upcoming collection because I’d hear her read locally, and I just about fell in love with her. Now here’s the reminder I promised you: read Collected Body. It doesn’t disappoint. I could try to give you a thorough rundown of what makes this collection distinctive, but I don’t know that I could do a better job than L.A. Grove has already done at the California Journal of Poetics. Read the review here and then give Collected Body the attention it deserves.
 Flies, by Michael Dickman
Michael Dickman’s second collection won this year’s James Laughlin Award for the best second book by an American poet. His verse is spare and often unnerving, leaving lines precariously balanced on the backs of single words. I found a lot of what I read in Flies funny, if darkly funny, without really being able to say what exactly it was I was laughing at, as if I were laughing just to break the tension in the room even though I was alone.
The Back Chamber, by Donald Hall
Stumbling across Donald Hall’s new collection felt like running into a favorite old teacher at the supermarket on a trip back home. I remember hearing Hall read when I was in high school and thinking for the first time that maybe it was possible for real live people to write poetry, too; that poetry wasn’t the sole province of the legendary dead I read about in my English classes. I still think of that as one of Hall’s greatest achievements: demonstrating the literary potential of every day. His simple diction and formal clarity continue to testify to the power of ordinary events so long as we are prepared to pay attention.
 Come, Thief, by Jane Hirshfield
Not a poet I know much about, this collection came as a pleasant surprise. Come, Thief is Hirshfield’s seventh collection, the followup to After, which was shortlisted for the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize. Hirshfield’s voice is commanding, moving the reader effortlessly through images and scenes that often appear at disjunctive, or sometimes seem to appear out of nowhere, but which inevitably yield some resonance, as if each poem produced an echo to fill the moment of silence that it created. Aphoristic and colored by Zen philosophy, Come, Thief invites long consideration of its smallest gestures.
By Eric Markowsky, on October 20th, 2011  Author: John Paul Stevens
2011, Little, Brown and Co.
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Informative... |
9 |
In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Supreme Court Season again, which means our nation’s top judges are now hearing cases that will affect your life. Holding top billing, we have The State of Florida (and 26 other co-signing states) v. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will test the constitutionality of last year’s controversial healthcare overhaul. But this is only one case of many, and, as Atlantic legal correspondent Garrett Epps points out, the majority of the cases the court will hear this session “have huge practical impact but are devoid of drama.”
You might say the same thing about Five Chiefs. Without an ounce of sensationalism or any inflammatory rhetoric, it offers an insider’s perspective on the deliberative processes of our nation’s foremost deliberating body. Stevens presents a historical survey of the Court under each of its seventeen Chief Justices, focusing on the five who sat during the years he was personally associated with the Court, from his clerkship in 1947 until his resignation in 2010.
It’s an eye-opening look at how the Court actually works, from the influence of the Chief’s management style to the long-standing traditions meant to foster cordiality between people who are paid to argue with each other. Five Chiefs won’t keep you up at night, but it will make you think about how we decide some of the most important questions facing the country today… so maybe it will keep a you up at night. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 6th, 2011  Author: Chad Harbach
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Literary.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
For fifty pages, I was hooked. Henry Skrimshander is a small-town kid with an almost supernatural sense for playing shortstop. He’s discovered at what might have been the last game of his career and recruited to play for Westish College, a small D III school in Wisconsin. Under the guidance of Mike Schwartz, the Westish teammate who discovered him, Henry rises into the ranks of the nation’s best college players. His future seems bright and assured.
Then we’re introduced to Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College. He’s an interesting guy, but his story doesn’t really have as much to do with Henry as Henry’s roommate, Owen, and there’s Guert’s daughter, Pella, who’s fleeing a failed marriage. Also, Schwartz is having some problems figuring out his life after graduation.
The writing is solid throughout, the characters are convincing and likable enough that I never felt totally dissatisfied, but I often found myself pushing through chapters wondering when all of this was going to get back to Henry, because (surprise) his bright future might not be such a sure thing after all. Unfortunately, Henry’s perspective and his trials on the diamond occupy less space as the novel progresses, and the work as a whole suffers for it.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on September 16th, 2011  Author: Stuart Nadler
2011, Regan Arthur Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.
While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on August 29th, 2011 [In this new series (idea copped from High Fidelity), our contributors put together a "top 5" list of books on a theme of their choosing. Read other entries in Top 5 Books here, and catch up on other fun series like this on our Special Features page.]
Pretty much every night before I turn off the light, I read in bed for a while first. It’s a way of focusing myself for sleep, a way of driving off the stray concerns of day by replacing them with a singular voice. Mostly, this works for me, but I’ve learned over the years that reading in bed can be a dangerous proposition. I come from a line of pretty adept insomniacs to begin with, so put a good book in my hands and I’m apt to forget why I was in bed in the first place until it’s already 3 am. If the book isn’t good enough, though, then it just doesn’t do the trick. I lay my head down still full of whatever was hassling my mind during the day.
To that end, I’ve identified a certain kind of book that puts me to sleep in the best possible way. Each of these books comes doled out in small doses of strangeness, short, experimental pieces I can finish in a few minutes while I’m winding down and still take away something worth dreaming about.
Five Books to Take to Bed
 5. The Weather of Words, by Mark Strand
This collection of “poetic inventions” presents one of America’s greatest living poets at his most nimble. It includes literary criticism, personal essays, prose poems, and fictional encounters with Jorge Luis Borges and a President who likes to read Chekhov to his cabinet. In whatever form it takes, Strand’s voice is always confident and compelling. He could write for the IRS and probably manage to make the tax code riveting reading. Thankfully, he has a lot more imagination than that. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on June 28th, 2011  Author: Richard Goodwin
2011, Seedpod Publishing
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Short-Run.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Here’s a pretty good set up for a short story: Wicker, a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker trying to get to Vegas, scores a ride from Edna, a senile retired school teacher looking for the Pacific Ocean. There’s plenty of comic potential in the contrast of characters, but more than that there’s an opportunity to explore the strange ways that people use one another, taking turns lending direction and meaning to each other’s lives, helping and being helped, exploiting and being exploited.
Scattershot is what happens when you stretch that premise into a rambling novel by adding an irrelevant subplot about Edna’s unhappy son, Andrew, and refusing to see her senility as little more than a punch line. She bumbles along, always certain that she’s doing just what she means to be doing, never doubting, never angry, never afraid, ready to follow Wicker wherever he thinks they should go. The problem is, once he loses his bankroll in Vegas, Wicker is just as aimless as she is.
After that, all the aptly named Scattershot has to offer is the impulsive leading the senile with the sad tagging along. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 25th, 2011  Author: Jim Shepard
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Short Stories, Historical, Horror, Literary.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
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You Think That’s Bad offers 11 stories inspired by a diverse array of subjects, from flood control and avalanche research to World War II and the Japanese film industry. Each one is thoroughly researched, tightly written, and full of compelling, hopeless characters. As a collection, though, You Think That’s Bad strikes the same emotional chord a little too often to make the whole something greater than its best parts.
One story is about a Black World operative who can’t talk to his wife. One is about a Dutch hydraulics engineer who can’t talk to his wife. There’s a particle physicist who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Japanese special effects designer who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Polish mountaineer who does a better job talking to his wife, but not nearly good enough to save either of them from himself. It’s tragic watching these obsessed men ruin their lives one after the other, but some things start to feel repetitive. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 2nd, 2011  So, okay, for starters, a deserted island book should be long. And sure, it should be complicated enough to make it worth reading and puzzling over again and again. Of course it should be both dense and entertaining in nearly lethal doses. But how about this? I want to be able to read it in any order I like, flip it open to any page and start anew, as if the first sentence my eyes landed on were the beginning of a whole new book, without any loss to the coherence of the whole.
It would also be nice if the book gave me something to do other than simply reading it for comprehension, a project beyond finishing it and then finishing it again. I’d like a book I that leant itself to memory, something with a little form and rhythm, so I could read it and read it until I knew it by heart.
That’s right. I’m talking about a book of poetry. Specifically, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on April 13th, 2011 Author: Téa Obreht
Random House, 2011
Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
With all the hype about the New Yorker’s 20 under 40, it’s nice to read a debut novel by one of their young authors that lives up to the marketing. The Tiger’s Wife is a captivating combination of history and fable. In her own life and in her grandfather’s stories, the narrator confronts questions of belief in the face of desire for understanding, for relief, and for release. Rather than resolving the world of the novel into one ruled by magic beyond human comprehension, the book’s fairytale elements only accentuate the challenges inherent in faith and doubt.
Natalia is on her way to a medical mission at an orphanage across the border when she receives news of the strange circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s death. Having lied to his wife about going to meet Natalia on her mission, he dies from an illness he’d long concealed, alone in the small town of Zdrevkov near the coast. Figuring out why he chose to slip away from his family to die among strangers drives his granddaughter out to the coast and into his past, into one story she knows and one she will learn. …
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