Reviewed by Tobias Carroll Robert Lopez Asunder Dzanc Books; 165 p. 2009 saw the release of Robert Lopez’s second novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, a meticulously crafted work that, over the course of its pages, brilliantly created contrasting senses of space. Its narrator begins the novel in a very particular kind of isolation, stylized and haunting; from there, the canvas of the novel expands via a series of memories. Suddenly, the room in which the narrator is confined gives way […]
Reviewed: Peep Show by Joshua Braff
Algonquin Books, 2010 Reviewed by Deb Steckler How do you deal with pain? How do you document what is true? In Joshua Braff’s Peep Show, the author sets out a formal arrangement of polar extremes as a stretching rack – a sort of torture device to manifest the pains and responses of his character, a young high school age boy-man named David Arbus. In so doing Braff allows the reader a peek into two otherwise hermetic and exotic-seeming New York […]
Reviewed: How to Be Inappropriate By Daniel Nester
Soft Skull Press, 2009, 272 pp. Reviewed by Claire Shefchik Straight off, Daniel Nester points out that “inappropriate” is standard boilerplate these days, in the media and in politics, for anything that could potentially make someone uncomfortable. It’s annoying, yes, but if you’re Nester, you respond by taking a dump on it, or at least by writing articulately about people who do. How to Be Inappropriate is handmade for frat-boys-turned-English majors, taking a bodily-fluid-covered hatchet to literary convention, as in […]