The Brooklyn Rail

Men Being Played

Jim Gavin’s Middle Men is a fantastic book for any number of reasons, not least of which is its genesis story (he’s one of those plucked-from-the-slush-at-the-New-Yorker genesis stories that are both maddening but glorious, evidence that the unlikely is always worth believing in).

Something Has Happened

Aphoria is an antiquated term synonymous with barren, specifically regarding female reproduction. There’s also aporia, which is (according to thefreedictionary.com) “A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question,” plus there’s aphasia, having to do with language disorders, losing the ability to speak, etc.

The Morality of Money

My interest is in addressing the writer Jean Thompson and her work at present, but one is immediately confronted with the question of where to begin.

Tampa

One can’t read much about Tampa without seeing mention of it being a reverse-Lolita, but Tampa is far more than merely a book with a creepily propulsive idea behind it.

Torquing the Form

Flash fiction is weird for any number of reasons, not least that when flash fiction fails, the reader can end up feeling not so much like the specific story failed, but like the enterprise of flash fiction is untenable.

What’s Left To Say

It’s totally fair to greet any new book about the Beatles with the SNL-ish derisive question: really? What could possibly be left to pick at on those ghostbones?

Precipice and Aftermath

Maybe you know about Kevin Barry because you were one of the lucky ones who read his City of Bohane (Graywolf, 2012), either before or after it was shortlisted for the Costa and then when it won the IMPAC Dublin Literary award. Maybe you found him, as I did, by reading his story “Fjord of Killary” when it was published in early 2010 in the New Yorker—remember, that weird story with the steadily insistent writing about the guy who bought a hotel and ran a bar and, in the story, there’s a flood coming? Remember?

The Troubador's Simple Songs

I once worked in a bookstore and this large soft, new-age guy—Lennon-ish spectacles, long hair, deep interest in eastern philosophies and martial arts/practices, tea instead of coffee—was just enough off that I couldn’t like him. One night he was doing stock work in the basement, and, the next day, we discovered that, along with stocking, he’d scrawled Collins poems on large sheets of paper and taped them all around. They stayed hanging up the rest of the time I worked at the bookstore, neither offensive nor in-enough to matter. They were mental furniture.

The Rules of Obsession

Jaime Clarke’s Vernon Downs is a fast-moving and yet, at times, quite sad book about, in the broadest sense, longing. The specifics of the longing, ultimately, revolve around a simple premise: a boy (Charlie Martens) has a crush on a cute British girl (Olivia). He wants to impress her, wants her in the most basic, biological way.

The Story of My Teeth

Let’s acknowledge that the vast majority of art involves a balance between being asked something and being given something (usually, attention/work given over for the deep pleasure of meaning/empathy/story/connection), and let’s further acknowledge that the way we usually think about this stuff has to do with whether the art is easy/commercial or hard/pure.

Lennon’s Scream

Kevin Barry writes the best sentences in English and his new novel, Beatlebone, is outrageously good—better even than his massively well-regarded and awarded (and excellent) début novel City of Bohane.

In Conversation

CHRIS BACHELDER with Weston Cutter

I keep trying to think of some clever way to introduce Chris Bachelder’s new book, but the first instinct remains best: Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special is the best book of 2016, and the dream scenario for this year includes Bachelder being recognized and heralded, as it sure seems like he‘s been moving toward throughout his whole career.

Catching up with the Lovable Losers

When Ford Madox Ford wrote, “This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard” he was wrong. When he wrote that, he couldn’t have known about the Replacements either, so we have to give him a pass. Still, almost a century after he opened his novel about a soldier’s fall-apart life with that line, the historical record needs to be corrected: the saddest story ever is the story about Minnesota’s greatest band, the Replacements.

Open to the What-If

One solid reason for choosing to review books is for the possibility of being blown completely back in your chair on getting a book you didn’t see coming. The frequency of this occurrence isn’t of course all that great: lots of times the books that hit real hard send their own little tremors forward, warnings like those that precede earthquakes though, certainly, some of this has to do with how attuned a reviewer might be to the larger book publishing industry.

Canon Fodder

It’s weirdly easy to no longer be quite so shocked by what John D’Agata’s pulled off with his three-volume American Essay series for Graywolf.

The What is That

Yet here we are now with Bob Hicok’s latest collection, Sex & Love &, and it’s a book resolutely concerned, as ever, with the tiny infinite aspects of life, those smallest irreducible bits of existence that constitute what buzzing hum we sometimes believe we hear, but this one’s using sex and love as its entrance point to those tiny bits.

Manderley Again

Gina Wohlsdorf’s Security contains at least two major stories, and while one of them is a fairly sweet love story about wounded folks who manage to find each other and their way, the other one is so unbelievably terrifying and fraught that it’s actually easy to overlook, or certainly attempt to speed through, the sweeter parts of this novel.

Melissa Yancy’s Exacting, Precise World

One wants not to praise faintly: this isn’t simply an admirable book, one of those this-is-good-for-you literary vitamins. Dog Years is that, but it’s also quietly startling, drawing the reader’s eye toward the quiet, tiny details that make life accrue feeling and sense, maybe even meaning.

Deep Monstrosity

A tempting entrance in reviewing Megan Abbott’s almost freakishly propulsive You Will Know Me is to note that your reviewer’s a 37-year-old white male with nothing more than the casual quadrennial enthusiasm for gymnastics, which enthusiasm demands nothing more than sitting on a couch pretending to be able to suss out differences between flips, vaults, routines.

Intimations and Hints

Coincidence led to my reading Maryse Meijer’s Heartbreaker and Erin Stalcup’s And Yet It Moves overlappingly, and like most coincidences this one offered an odd cross-pollination.

Picking at the Whole Notion of Story

Say you discover in your teens that your dad was married to another woman when he met your mother (and that he lied to your mother about his marital status), and that when your parents divorce, you go with your bipolar mother, and your older sister goes with your dad. Say your dad is a somewhat/sometimes charming guy but also secretive and always short on money, and that, at some point, you realize that the cause of this charming secretive cashlessness has to do with a severe gambling addiction.

In Conversation

Same as I Ever Was
Susan Perabo with Weston Cutter

I like stories (and I mean here both short stories and novels) where dramatic events happen early, and then those events are made worse—or at least more complicated—by the inept ways characters choose to deal with them. I like to watch people continually screw things up. That’s the kind of story I like to read, and that’s the kind of story I like to write. That’s what keeps me inside.

Left Lying

I fell hard for Susan Perabo last year after reading her short-story collection Why They Run the Way They Do, a collection of somehow entirely domestic, and truly mysterious and strange stories.

Ghost Story

Let’s admit at the outset that it has grown weirdly difficult to read or respond to George Saunders. Not because he’s not great, but because he’s now So Great.

Emotional Tumult, Formal Play

Albert Mobilio’s Games and Stunts is a weirdly devastating book, one whose heft you can’t imagine on picking up the slim volume.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Certainly Grann’s work isn’t easy (if it is, Mr. Grann, please don't correct the record)...

Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

I’m as anti-pun as the next guy, so forgive me: I was sucked in by the sea lampreys.

In Conversation

MATT HART with Weston Cutter

This is now the third time I’ve interviewed Matt Hart for a publication, which seems strange simply because, when I first witnessed him, he sorta scared me. If you’ve seen him, you know: Matt’s engaged and loud at his readings, as interested in polyphony and aural dynamics as he is in transmitting verbal info (if you write, you likely leave his readings wondering why you’re not doing the same as he does, or at least that’s how I feel).

In Conversation

MAILE MELOY with Weston Cutter

I guess I’m curious how this book even began. There feel to be competing claims or developments—or I can imagine, I guess, different onramps (a pair of close relatives vacationing together on a cruise; a set of kids getting lost; a story of a little girl trying to make her way north). Was there some specific instance that initiated it all, that you kept coming back to?

Maile Meloy's Do Not Become Alarmed

The first Maile (pronounced, just so you’re hearing it correctly in your head from here out: my-lee) Meloy thing I remember reading was the story about the guy who does proxy marriages with his crush/friend for quick/easy cash (it was in the New Yorker in ’12 and is called “The Proxy Marriage”); it was a pretty story, and freighted, and it had a weird magnetism to it, but it didn’t upend me. The story that did that was/is her masterful “Two-step,” which is in her absolutely perfect collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, and I’m better off not getting into the story and my almost rhapsodic fervency for it. It’s among the very best American short stories written in the last thirty years.

Yuri Herrera's Kingdom Cons

Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons is an odd book to contend with, regardless of circumstance—it’s a brief, fable-ish tale one experiences almost as much cinematically as literarily.

The Care for Precision

There’s gotta be a German word for the feeling. It’s somehow total joy and a huge swell of sorrow simultaneously—the joy bigger than the sorrow but still deeply tempered. The feeling’s what you get while watching a really great film whose uplift costs significantly (the not-coincidentally German Lives of Others, for instance), and it’s the feeling I felt on finishing John McPhee’s latest, Draft No. 4.

Night Boat to Tangier

Kevin Barry is the only author I know of (currently working) whose work equally inspires and inundates any aspirant with dread. His latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier (2019) is undoubtedly his best novel yet, and, I'd argue, his strongest fiction, period—which is saying something, given that Kevin Barry's one of the best short story writers alive.

Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League and Luke Geddes’s Heart of Junk

Both debut novels are broad, multi-character stories circumscribed within a fairly small framework in terms of time and locale, and both offer, in ways unrivaled by much recently, such welcome release and relief from the wildness of daily life that I'm bereft having finished them, even if neither was without flaw.

The Underground Railroad

Imagine being as broadly good at anything as Colson Whitehead is at writing.

Oceanography

Jeremy Griffin is a writer of absolute power, and I say that as someone who desperately wishes not to write that. No one is more frustrated to write about this book's excellence than I.

The Elemental Similarities That Unite Us

for an ongoing two months I’ve had Charles Pierce’s short stories on my mind, specifically “The Real Alan Gass” and “Videos of People Falling Down.” I’d like to claim they’re the best of the stories in Hall of Small Mammals, his phenomenally good debut collection out from Riverhead in January,

Two by Scott McClanahan

Scott McClanahan’s work is hard to encapsulate and almost impossible to ignore or fail to be swept up and in by. His writing’s a strange charismatic twinning of a faithful fervor and this almost loving skepticism.

In Conversation

MATTHEW VOLLMER with Weston Cutter

That Matthew Vollmer’d end up chasing stranger forms of prose was not, I don’t think, clear, at least to me when I met him.

To Articulate the Daily Miraculous

An interesting question to attempt to wrestle with regardless of the inclination of your spiritual life is, “What’s the purpose of prayer?” Not of specific prayers: even if we’re not of a religious bent, most of us understand there are certain prayers taken up for certain things (mostly filable under gratitude or assistance, largely). But no, no: What’s the point of prayer—like, daily prayer?