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Nailing Down the Truth
April 16, 2013
Featuring reviews of:
Janet Planet by Eleanor Lerman. Mayapple Press, 2011, 208 pp., $17.95 (paper).
Faith by Jennifer Haigh. Harper Perennial, 2012, 352 pp., $14.99 (paper).
Intuition by Allegra Goodman. Dial Press, 2007, 400 pp., $15 (paper).
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Harper Perennial, 2011, 432 pp., $14.99 (paper).
The Best-Selling Author Down the Hall
February 12, 2013
Featuring reviews of:
Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller
Dream Catcher by Margaret Salinger
Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff
Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez
In My Father’s Footsteps by Sebastian Matthews
Not One of Us: Four Books that Explore the Implication of Class in America
December 10, 2012
Featuring reviews of:
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray. Crown Forum, 2012.
Class Matters. Correspondents of The New York Times. Times Books, 2005.
Class: A Guide Through the American Class System. Paul Fussell. Touchstone, 1992.
Old Money in America: Aristocracy in the Age of Obama. John Hazard Forbes. iUniverse, 2010.
The Literature of Wrongful Conviction
July 24, 2012
Featuring reviews of: Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-Five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice by Edwin M. Borchard (1932) The Court of Last Resort by Erle Stanley Gardner (1954) The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town by John Grisham …
“That One Was the Oddest One”: Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry
January 6, 2012
by Jason Koo
Featuring reviews of:
Dorothea Lasky, Black Life, Wave Books, 2010, 77 pp., $14
Arda Collins, It Is Daylight, Yale University Press, 2009, 93 pp., $16
Jason Bredle, Smiles of the Unstoppable, Magic Helicopter Press, 2011, 55 pp., $11.95
![34.3 (Fall 2011): "Legacy" [Cover art: Mosh Pit 2000 by Dan Witz]](http://www.missourireview.com/archives/files/3403big-150x198.jpg)
The Happiness Craze: Books in Search of Bliss
October 9, 2011
Featuring reviews of:
Happiness: A History, by Darrin M. McMahon. Grove Press, 2006.
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Vintage Books, 2007.
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. Basic Books, 2006.
Against Happiness: in Praise of Melancholy, by Eric G. Wilson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, 2009.
Growing Up PK
July 17, 2011
Featuring reviews of:
Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Hancock. Center Street Press, 2008, 288 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition).
Easter Everywhere, by Darcy Steinke. Bloomsbury, 2008, 240 pp., $14.95 (paper).
Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, by Peter Manseau. Free Press, 2006, 416 pp., $15.
A River Runs Through It, by Norman MacLean. University of Chicago Press, 2001, 239 pp., $12 (paper).
The Preacher’s Boy, by Terry Pringle. Algonquin, 1988, 280 pp.
Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, by Kevin Jennings. Beacon, 2006. 267 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition).
Lives of the Poets: On Recent Novels About Poets
July 13, 2011
Reviews of:
Jerome Charyn, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, W. W. Norton and Company, 2010
Ron Hansen, Exiles, Picador, 2009
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze, Penguin, 2010
Brian Hall, Fall of Frost, Penguin, 2009
Michael Sledge, The More I Owe You, Counterpoint, 2010
Books with Bite: The Evolution of the Vampire in Contemporary Literature
July 1, 2011
by Erik Smetana
Featuring reviews of:
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Tor Books, 2007 (Reprint), 320 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ebba Segerberg (translator). St. Martin’s Press, 2008, 480 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. Dutton Adult, 2009, 432 pp., $15 (paper)
The Passage by Justin Cronin. Ballantine Books, 2010, 784 pp., $2 (paper)
Into History: A New Terrain of Women’s Poetry
September 1, 2010
Reviews of:
Sarah Kennedy, Home Remedies, Louisiana State University Press, 2009, 70 pp., $17.95 (paper).
Frannie Lindsay, Mayweed, The Word Works, 2009, 76 pp., $15 (paper).
Rebecca Foust, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, Wave Books, 2010, 80 pp., $15.95 (paper).
Sara London, Tyranny of Milk, Four Way Books, 2010, 100 pp., $15.95 (paper).
Political Stories: The Individual in Contemporary Fiction
September 1, 2010
by Nathan Oates
Featuring reviews of The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud), A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ken Kalfus), Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), Delirium (Laura Restrepo), and Last Evenings on Earth (Roberto Bolaño). This full review is not currently available online.
Arcadian Rhythms: The New Pastoralism in Contemporary Poetry
June 1, 2010
Features reviews of:
Maurice Manning, Bucolics, Mariner Books, 2008, 120 pp., $14 (paperback reprint)
David Baker, Midwest Eclogue: Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, 112 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Christopher Bakken, Goat Funeral: Poems, Sheep Meadow, 2007, 75 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Morri Creech, Field Knowledge, Waywiser Press, 2006, 79 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Obession as Mythmaking: Six Books About Books
March 1, 2010
Featuring reviews of:
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style by Mark Garvey
U and I by Nicholson Baker
Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Hitchcock
The Postmodern Postconfessional Lyric
December 1, 2009
Reviews of: The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Paisley Rekdal. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007, 88 pp., $14.00 (paper) Universal Monsters, Bryan Dietrich. Word Press, 2007, 156 pp., $18.00 (paper) Ka-Ching!,Denise Duhamel. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, 96 pp., $14.95 (paper) …
In Search of Lost Tone: American Poetry in a Year of Change
September 1, 2009
by Jason Koo
Reviewed: Jennifer Chang, The History of Anonymity: Poems Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems Mary Ruefle, The Most of It Sean Hill, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor
By Oath or Affirmation: Six Books About the U.S. Constitution
June 1, 2009
Reviews of America’s Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar; Christianity and the Constitution, by John Eidsmoe; The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin; Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How …
My Next Read
June 1, 2009
Includes discussion of Corpus Christmas by Margaret Maron, Howards End by E.M. Forster, Emma by Jane Austen, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
Gaping at a Shoe: Intellectualism in American Literature
December 1, 2008
by Nathan Oates
Featuring reviews of: The Unpossessed by Tess Slessinger All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick.
The Droves of Academe
September 1, 2008
Featuring reviews of: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl On Beauty by Zadie Smith The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter
Agonists of the Contemporary Memoir
June 1, 2008
But writers such as Mairs and Knapp and Dubus make a subject of their afflictions and return to that subject. I have called them “agonists” because they seem to embody all of the original meanings of the Greek word that came down to us as agony: the struggle, the public contest, the anguish. These writers are performing their struggle with suffering; by writing they make public the pain that is ordinarily invisible and always located within the single self.
A Review of Seven First Poetry Books
March 1, 2008
Featuring reviews of: Barter by Monica Youn My Soviet Union by Michael Dumanis Floating City by Anne Pierson Wiese Standing in Line for the Beast by Jason Bredle Sister by Nickole Brown The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg Frail-Craft by Jessica Fisher.
Fluency in Form: A Survey of the Graphic Memoir
December 1, 2007
by Lisa Hoashi
Featuring reviews of: The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman; Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi; Epileptic, by David B.; Blankets, by Craig Thompson; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; and Cancer Vixen, by Marisa Acocella Marchetto.
Dimension and Authority
March 1, 1988
by Rodney Jones
This review is not currently available online. Any attempt to compare poets as accomplished as Amy Clampitt, Gerald Stern, C.K. Williams, and Donald Justice poses an ethical problem, for each has created work that demands a distinctive reading. It would …
The Changing American Novel
September 1, 1984
by Bruce Allen
An Omnibus Review of First Novels Excerpt: The best five or six American novels I’ve read this year are all first novels. What’s remarkable about this is not just their individual qualities, but the fact that they managed to get …