Forest of Fortune has been out for little over a year but I have a bit of news to share: I spoke with San Diego writer Karen Stefano at Rare Bird Radio about her book, The Secret Games of Words, casino life and our mutual friend Bud Smith. Then check out this new review of Forest of Fortune at The Amazing Store.
Tag Archives: Reviews
TFL #58
The Floating Library takes a look at a pair of novels with similar subjects and identical titles: Junkie Love (a memoir) by Joe Clifford and Junkie Love (a novel) by Phil Shoenfelt. An excerpt:
I’ve heard stories of writers coming up with the “perfect” title for his or her book, only to discover that it had already been taken; but I’d never met two authors who had books with the same title until this year.
Feel the Love
I really enjoyed Loving Day, the new novel from Mat Johnson. It might be the most frank and open consideration of race I’ve encountered since Norman Mailer’s The Fight. I realize that’s a deeply weird comparison, especially since Loving Day is so relentlessly comic, but there’s something really admirable about the author’s determination to write about blackness and whiteness in contemporary America in a way that’s genuinely funny, particularly since it’s a conversation so many are strenuously avoiding. If this is your kind of conversation, check out my review in the Los Angeles Times.
The Up-Down
Thrilled to have the opportunity to review the latest from Barry Gifford, the author of Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and The Up-Down, the final chapter in the Sailor and Lula saga:
Written in Gifford’s trademark, modular style, “The Up-Down” rockets along at a breakneck pace. Gifford is a master of the set piece in the tradition of Nelson Algren: larger-than-life characters, ribald dialogue and an uninhibited spirit that seesaws between the profound and the profane.
TFL #52
The Floating Library is besieged by sirens with reviews of Dorothy Iannone’s You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends and Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star.
Iannone’s work combines text and image in arresting fashion. While her figures are typically clothed, or at least ornamented, their genitalia are almost always on display. While the text describes erotic scenes, it’s seldom vulgar—more Marguerite Duras than Anaïs Nin—and more often then not, the words are used to convey stories, recipes, anecdotes and aphorisms of a nonsexual nature. The result is something that appears at first blush to be as shocking as Raymond Pettibon, only more poetic and much more polite.
Read the rest of the review here.
Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
I had the pleasure of reviewing Tom McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, for the Los Angeles Times. I had a lot to say about this book and had to cut the review back. I think McCarthy says some interesting things about the direction we’re headed and it’s not pretty.
McCarthy’s style is at times reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s stories of characters caught in the gears of consumer capitalism coupled with the whimsy of Jean Philippe Toussaint’s literary situational comedies in which every detail is microanalyzed. “Satin Island” also owes something to the dot-com-era work novel; an air of catastrophic contemporaneousness hangs over the proceedings as U. is sustained by and trapped in a system he knows cannot possibly last. “The Company’s logo was a giant crumbling tower. It was Babel, of course, the old Biblical parable.”
Read the rest of the review. You might also enjoy this interview at Vulture.