Inside the Ordinary

Inside the Ordinary | Reviews

Steve Almond on “Brief Encounters with the Enemy” by Said Sayrafiezadeh

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Brief Encounters with the Enemy (cover)

“His prose has an allegorical quality that is long on evocation and short on specifics. We have no idea why the war started, for example, or against whom it is being waged. We know only that it’s been great for business. The weather has gone haywire, though no reference is made to global climate change. The accounts assembled here read less like dispatches from America in particular, and more like the existential fables of an empire in decline.

The most striking symptom of this decline is a perverse merger of patriotism and consumerism.”

Read the full review . . . .

Reviewer Steve Almond

Story Collection Brief Encounters with the Enemy (Dial Press, 2013) by Said Sayrafiezadeh

Readings

Fugitive PiecesThe Winter VaultLife on MarsDuendeThe FallThe Stranger
The PlagueThe Myth of Sisyphus and Other EssaysEdgewaterMy War Gone By, I Miss It SoMercy SeatArt of Poetry Writing
The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's CenturySensual Math: PoemsWideawake Field: PoemsThe Memory of WaterThe Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence ToolsetSearch Party: Collected Poems



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David Kirby on “Late Parade” by Adam Fitzgerald

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The Late Parade (book cover).

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“No, his is a third way, a poetry that is neither sealed off from human ears nor bent solely on pleasing them. In a word, his poems are drunk on both word and allusion and are therefore doubly tipsy. There are plenty of poets who are word-drunk and plenty of others who slap down allusions faster than a blackjack dealer. But I can’t think of anyone today who is dealing in both currencies as fluidly as Fitzgerald.”

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Reviewer: David Kirby 

Book: The Late Parade (Liveright/Norton) by Adam Fitzgerald 

Read the full review . . . 

Readings

Fugitive PiecesThe Winter VaultLife on MarsDuendeThe FallThe Stranger
The PlagueThe Myth of Sisyphus and Other EssaysEdgewaterMy War Gone By, I Miss It SoMercy SeatArt of Poetry Writing
The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's CenturySensual Math: PoemsWideawake Field: PoemsThe Memory of WaterThe Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence ToolsetSearch Party: Collected Poems



Share book reviews and ratings with DV,
and even join a book club on Goodreads.

DarkViolin Readings »

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Eleanor Henderson on Brewster by Mark Slouka

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Brewster (book cover)

“Slouka’s storytelling is sure and patient, deceptively steady and devastatingly agile. Like Ray, the profoundly lovable hero, “Brewster” is full of secrets, and they are tragic ones: there is no sadder fate than being hated by someone who should love you. Yet the story manages to transcend its hopeless circumstances. All the tender feelings these kids’ parents should feel for them are transferred to us. We love them. They are our children, and in loving them, they are saved, and so are we.”

Reviewer: Eleanor Henderson @eleanorofithaca

Book: Brewster (Harcourt) by Mark Slouka 

Read the full review . . .

Readings

Fugitive PiecesThe Winter VaultLife on MarsDuendeThe FallThe Stranger
The PlagueThe Myth of Sisyphus and Other EssaysEdgewaterMy War Gone By, I Miss It SoMercy SeatArt of Poetry Writing
The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's CenturySensual Math: PoemsWideawake Field: PoemsThe Memory of WaterThe Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence ToolsetSearch Party: Collected Poems



Share book reviews and ratings with DV,
and even join a book club on Goodreads.

DarkViolin Readings »

Follow DarkViolin at GoodReads

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Tania James on “The Village” by Nikita Lalwani

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The Village (book cover)

One of the novel’s great strengths is how it maintains an ambience of mystery and menace, partly due to the secrecy shrouding the inmates. The story gathers force once the filmmakers pierce the shroud, directly intervening in the fates of several villagers, in ways that are emotionally destructive to their subjects but propulsive to the film they want to make. Here is where the central argument is animated by action, culminating in an ending more heart-wrenching and morally muddled than can exist in a neatly packaged television episode.

Reviewer: Tania James

Book: The Village (Random House) by Nikita Lalwani

Read the full review . . .

Readings

Fugitive PiecesThe Winter VaultLife on MarsDuendeThe FallThe Stranger
The PlagueThe Myth of Sisyphus and Other EssaysEdgewaterMy War Gone By, I Miss It SoMercy SeatArt of Poetry Writing
The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's CenturySensual Math: PoemsWideawake Field: PoemsThe Memory of WaterThe Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence ToolsetSearch Party: Collected Poems



Share book reviews and ratings with DV,
and even join a book club on Goodreads.

DarkViolin Readings »

Follow DarkViolin at GoodReads

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Tucson Tombstone Regionalia: “Son of a Gun”

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Son of a Gun (book cover)

It’s “an elitist fantasy, the simple life,” St. Germain writes of that lying dream. “I ought to know better, ought to remember how it feels to live in a place like this, the grinding poverty, the lack of opportunity, all the kinds of self-defeat — alcohol, drugs, gossip — the gnawing fear that you haven’t gotten away from the world, it’s gotten away from you . . .”

Violence is America’s fetish, and it’s St. Germain’s bête noire. In Tombstone, Ariz., where he’s raised after his mother lands there (according to a former fiancé, “she’d always wanted to see the O.K. Corral,” the setting of Wyatt Earp’s notorious gunfight), he remarks of the World’s Largest Rosebush, “It’s my favorite place in all of Tombstone, the only pure thing in this whole town, the only attraction that doesn’t depend on somebody dying.” This single elegant sentence proves that if the brilliance of “Son of a Gun” lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.

Justin St. Germain has written a memoir, Son of a Gun (Random House), that is riveting because his own mother was murdered. Is a story of violence and Arizona “Marriage Handbooks.”  It is all too easy for this Tucson native to imagine him “at a support-group meeting in a rundown hospital complex in Tucson years after his mother’s death.”

Reviewer: Alexandra Fuller Read the full review. . .

Readings

Fugitive PiecesThe Winter VaultLife on MarsDuendeThe FallThe Stranger
The PlagueThe Myth of Sisyphus and Other EssaysEdgewaterMy War Gone By, I Miss It SoMercy SeatArt of Poetry Writing
The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's CenturySensual Math: PoemsWideawake Field: PoemsThe Memory of WaterThe Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence ToolsetSearch Party: Collected Poems



Share book reviews and ratings with DV,
and even join a book club on Goodreads.

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Liesl Schillinger on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

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“Not all the mysteries Ondaatje explores in his account of Mynah’s sea passage — revisited in adulthood from the remove of decades and from another continent — have clear resolutions, nor do they need them. Uncertainty, Ondaatje shows, is the unavoidable human condition, the gel that changes the light on the lens, altering but not spoiling the image. . . “

Read full review . . .

Readings

Fugitive PiecesThe Winter VaultLife on MarsDuendeThe FallThe Stranger
The PlagueThe Myth of Sisyphus and Other EssaysEdgewaterMy War Gone By, I Miss It SoMercy SeatArt of Poetry Writing
The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family's CenturySensual Math: PoemsWideawake Field: PoemsThe Memory of WaterThe Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence ToolsetSearch Party: Collected Poems



Share book reviews and ratings with DV,
and even join a book club on Goodreads.

DarkViolin Readings »

Follow DarkViolin at GoodReads

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