Occasional Literary Magazine Reviews: Zyzzyva

Title: Zyzzyva Issue #98, Fall 2013 $12.00 Theme: It’s not immediately obvious by its cover. But then you flip to the jacket (yes, a lit mag with a jacket!) and there’s this phrase: “Having a Kid: What Could Go Wrong?” Here at Vol.1 Brooklyn, we like to keep everything “above board” (or at least I think we do..is that even the right idiom?) and not delve into too much personal stuff. But I’m about to become a father, like at […]

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Reviewed: “Asunder”

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 […]

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Reviewed: Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box By Jacques Boyreau

Fantagraphics Books, 200 p. Reviewed by Matthew Caron “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” So said Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, to a 1982 congressional panel investigating the legal quandaries presented by the VCR machine and the Record button in particular. The movie industry’s fear of VCR was soon proved baseless as home video […]

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Absurdities of War, Inglourious Reviews

No, Basterds is not a Schindler’s List, a Thin Red Line, or a Casablanca. But we don’t need any more war movies like that. The emotional core, more tangible than in any of Tarantino’s other films, builds from and questions every single war movie that’s ever been made.

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