Author:

A review of Kafka’s Shadow by Judith Skillman

It takes a lot of craftsmanship to have readers get inside the personalities and the culture of the characters in poems based on scholarship and detailed research—a huge task; all of the poems stick to the topic of Kafka and explore aspects of his family and his times.

A review of Dream Catcher by Margie Shaheed

Margie Shaheed’s Dream Catcher poems are eloquently woven word quilts. Life-filled, sensual, powerful, tender, courageous and unapologetic. Her poems are beautiful, richly crafted testaments written by a woman who knows and understands life in its many nuances.

We have a 3 book set of the Flinders Range series by Tricia Stringer including Heart of the Country, Dust on the Horizon, and Jewel of the North to giveaway. To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter.

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A review of The Restorer by Michael Sala

Maryanne’s own sense of self in relation to her overbearing mother and Freya’s sense of self in relation to Maryanne are handled with such richness that they give the story a great deal of depth, even as it pushes towards its inevitable outcome. The Restorer is a beautifully written and very powerful fiction that not only shines a light on the deep roots of domestic violence but also plays with the line of what remains in the face of such destruction. Sala’s story that will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

Strange Migrations: on the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

For the cast of characters the present has no meaning. They are suspended between the places they have left and a fantasy of a future home. These are the superimpositions of images that color their thoughts, their dreams, and their narratives – the binaries of home and abroad, the past and the future, the real and fantasy.

An interview with Barnaby Hazen

The author of Misfortunes of T-Funk talks about the inspiration for his story, the relationship between real-life and fiction, how he came up with incorporating music, the genres and artists that influence the music in his book, the fascinations of music, his periodical Seven Eleven Stories, what’s coming next, and more.

Corrections: An Internet Interview with Jack Hamilton, author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan are compared by Hamilton for their musical roots and affiliation with particular communities and subsequent independence and experimentations with genre and form, though Dylan’s work has received much more critical exploration and celebration, suggesting, among other things, a misunderstanding of the choices—aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and political—that are made by African-American artists, who want both creativity and commerce, glamour and grit, imagination and intellect, and whose works affirm both style and substance.