The Songs of the Maniacs: Four Books on Madness and Creativity

Includes reviews of:

Manic Depression and Creativity. D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb. Prometheus Books, 1998, 230 pp., $24 (paper).
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Mind. Kay Redfield Jamison. Free Press, 1996, 384 pp., $16 (paper).
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. Alice Weaver Flaherty. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004, 320 pp., $15 (paper).
Poets on Prozac. Richard M. Berlin. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, 200 pp., $24.

“That One Was the Oddest One”: Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry

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

The Happiness Craze: Books in Search of Bliss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Dimension and Authority

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

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 …

Recent Translations of Latin American Fiction

Alejo Carpenter, the Cuban novelist, invented the phrase “marvelous reality” to describe a particular way of viewing Lating America. So many things seemed extraordinary, paradoxical, and magical that he could hardly believe what his own eyes saw.

Notes on Some Recently Found Lost American Fiction

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Recent American Short Fiction

This content is not currently available online.