Throughout this biography, Munson makes clear that Franklin’s scientific engagement with the world is a perpetual touchstone. No matter where he is on the planet—striving in his early life in the states, representing the states in England, working as a wartime ambassador in France, or traversing the ocean in between—Franklin is continuously scientifically inquisitive, continuously meeting and corresponding with other investigators, continuously inventing, and continuously devising and refining experiments.
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A review of Fit Into Me by Molly Gaudry
So many of Gaudry’s sentences, from the very first – “Because most nights during the final semester of my MFA at George Mason University, while recovering from a mild traumatic brain injury, I fell asleep watching Prison Break on my laptop in bed.” – to the penultimate sentence – “Because words, imagined in the greatest yearning, as a means of finding love, defining it; as a means of shaping it (This is how it feels, this is where it hurts) and sharing with others its permutations, astonishments, exaltations, and erosions.” – seem to offer an explanation for some unstated condition.
A review of The Victoria Principle by Michael Farrell
By keeping close to home, the pieces in this collection challenge notions of what is and isn’t real, undermining notions of memoir, which is a construct no matter how it’s labelled. It makes for consistently entertaining, and often challenging reading that encourages uncertainty. This shift between memoir, fiction and poetry feels seamless, challenging the reader to re-examine notions of identity, history art.
A review of Final Curtain edited by Steve Berman
Final Curtain is a well curated collection featuring a pleasant variety of stories and interesting perspectives and interpretations of the characters and themes of The Phantom of the Opera. The period pieces are heavy and languid, broken up effectively by modern retellings, more experimental works, and the doings of cats. Choosing classical in style pieces at the fore and aft of the anthology was a masterful choice; one prepares you for what follows, the latter closes the loop; the audience at the theater retreat satisfied.
A review of Earthly by Jean Follain
Follain’s impersonal perspective puts him, in Francis Ponge’s phrase, on the side of objects. The natural features and man-made things that fill his poems are given presences of their own, which Follain brings out with a sharp eye and an understanding of their place within the human world.
A review of Where do you live? by Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and Jennifer Jean
The job of creative individuals, then, is to bear witness to the horrors inflicted by those who would destroy “our distant spark of light.” We must resist and carry our light into the future. Our task, says Where do you live?, is to be constantly raw , constantly attuned to these insults. We must feel them, record them, and keep going.
A review of The Dingo’s Noctuary by Judith Nangala Crispin
The idea that we are all en route to returning to outer space is a healing and consoling thought, bringing together the many themes in the book in a way that is both beautiful and heartbreaking. At $130,The Dingo’s Noctuary is not a cheap book, but it is a work of art, and one that continues to call the reader back to find new threads, new stories, and new transformations.
It Can Happen Here. And Here. And Here: a review of Helen Button by Carol Roh Spaulding
Helen Button is a minor character in Stein’s 1940 novel Paris, France. But in Carol Roh Spaulding’s ambitious, painstakingly researched, dual-narrative novel, Hélène—whose American mother is fragile, whose French father has left the family, and whose stuffy stepfather, while by no means a horror, works for the Vichy government—arrives on the page as an eighty-three year-old woman in 2005, haunted by the memory of Isaiah Langwill, a three-year-old Jewish orphan who may or may not have been sent to a concentration camp from a hiding place near Stein and Toklas’s country home.
New giveaway!
We have a copy of The Blockchain Syndicate by Robbie Bach to give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of November from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!