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A review of Until I Find You by John Irving

Clearly John Irving is a talented writer, whose extensive research is matched by his extensive knowledge. It’s just a shame he doesn’t have a trusted editor willing to insist that Irving cut the ridiculous quantity of fluff out of his…

In the Shadow of the Past: John Legend, Once Again

The themes of John Stephens’s songs are variations on romance, and the songs resist cliché to the extent that they are imaginative or realistic, as the need (or case) may be. The collection’s first song—in which the singer asks someone…

A review of Fresh News from the Arctic by Libby Hart

Libby Hart’s Fresh News From The Arctic is a small but significant collection of poetry that is engaging, thought-provoking, sometimes wryly humorous, and that demands reading and rereading to uncover the delicate nuances hidden so artfully within its language. Reviewed by Liz…

Troubadour: Eric Bibb’s A Ship Called Love

Beauty is not always simple, and brilliance and excellence are not simple. The relationship of one kind of ethic to another—for instance, an ethic founded in reason, science and civil liberties versus a religious ethic—is not simple. By Daniel Garrett…

A review of Border Town by Hillel Wright

Wright excels at the exploration of popular culture. He writes well of comix, jazz, and the media. He is still enough of a hippy to deplore the world’s sad path to a reactionary and repressive right. He is not only…

A review of The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster

As Nathan’s own book of follies grows in an almost Rabelasian style, there are botched attempts at love and lust, outrageous names like “Marina Luisa Sanchez Gonzalez”, a physical and metaphysical quest towards a fictional construct called the “Hotel Existence”,…

A review of Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

But many of these pieces are in fact exceptionally good and the poetry, although Gaiman makes rather little of his poetry, is very good. He forthrightly asserts that it is meant to be read aloud and he measures its quality…