Poet and novelist Jennifer Maiden drops by to read from her latest novel Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker, and to talk about all three novels in the Play With Knives series, about the joy…
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of the Play with Knives trilogy by Jennifer Maiden
All three novels explore guilt and innocence, good and evil, and the individual versus the state or government, using changing tense and viewpoints. The grand conception is fairly ambitious, but Maiden handles it all smoothly and the stories read like ordinary thrillers. The binaries that charge these books are played with in all sorts of interesting ways as the characters swap positions, power matrices, emotional landscapes, and unravel the structures in which they work.
A review of So Much Smoke by Felix Calvino
Always there’s a sense that the world is not quite fixed and that what we’re experiencing is illusory (so much smoke), and charged by scars, memories, hunger, and all that we’ve lost. The stories that make up So Much Smoke are powerful, not so much because of what happens, but because of the way they hint at how much lurks below the surface
A review of Gnarled Bones by Tam May
On reading these stories, one is reminded of the paintings of Marc Chagall: a hermetic world of imagery, difficult to interpret, informed by rich folk traditions and personal experience. In Gnarled Bones, women are the principal (but by no means sole) targets of the past’s slings and arrows. In this regard, the opening story, ‘Mother of Mischief’, is the most interesting in the collection, casting retrospective light on its own ambiguous title and showing us how we can, after all, be the authors of our own entrapment.
Dr Joanna McMillan talks about Get Lean, Stay Lean
Nutritionist Dr Joanna McMillan talks about her new book Get Lean, Stay Lean, including how the book came together, why people are still struggling with nutritional and weightloss, outlines the Dr Joanna plate, her six steps to success and which one is…
A review of Pale Hearts by Emily Eckart
Emily Eckart’s debut short story collection, is unique and outstanding first and foremost for her literary craftswomanship. In “The Beech Tree”, the first story in the collection, she skilfully uses the imagery of trees, fruit and flowers in showing an unhappy girl’s relationship with her grandmother. More than just a detail of setting, the tree symbolizes the love between Grandma and her late husband, which flourished, grew large and endured.
Interview with Michele Seminara
Michele Seminara drops by to read from and talk about her poetry book Engraft and how it came together, the variety of forms and how she uses the page, about writing through Shakespeare, Kafka and other authors, about the tension between…
A review of Growing Dark: Selected Stories by Dennis Must
Dennis Must’s Going Dark is a succession of 17 short stories. Must’s writing is expressive, as he approaches the numerous stages of life we all share in the transition from youth to maturity to the inevitable death that awaits us all. The lives in these stories are unrelated, and yet very much the same. The work is at once a multilayered thought provoking psychological frolic in addition to being a deeply seated thoughtful work. Whatever the overview or leitmotif, each portrayal in this work ultimately goes dark as Must probes deep within the core of his intricate, complex characters.
Fresh Air and Empty Streets by Oliver Cable
The author’s descriptive passages of Paris are so powerful and illuminating that as Felix wanders through the City of Light it feels like we are right there beside him and when he stumbles his way into a romantic interlude with the beautiful waitress Senna, we can be thankful that the author allows us to turn away at the right moments. As his fumbling turns to manliness Felix begins to understand something about love and relationships and his attitude towards his father alters.
Interview with Michelle Cahill on Letter to Pessoa
Michelle Cahill reads “Aubade for Larkin” and talks about her new book Letter to Pessoa, including the book’s genesis, its shifting genres (and genders), about literary connection and disconnection, about writing meta-fiction, and the intersections between writing practice and philosophical discourse,…