In my New York Journal of Books review I compare Jonathan Galassi's new book Left-Handed: Poems to the movie Beginners and recommend it "to all poetry lovers and to all readers who find they must radically change their lives in order to live more authentically." via examiner.com
My examiner.com article about my NY Journal of Books reviews of Dan Chaon's Stay Awake and Nikanor Teratologen's Assisted Living
via examiner.com
Thanks to a change in the publication date of one of the books I have two reviews published on the same day. Both are novels in translation, one from Italian and the other from French.
“The Break is reminiscent of Italian neo-realist cinema of the late 1940s and is enthusiastically recommended to all readers. Kudos to Howard Curtis for a wonderful translation.” This paperback is printed on high quality paper with a handsome wrap-around cover.
“Because Underground Time’s prose largely lacks the delicious density of the best literary fiction in translation, it appears to target a middlebrow readership. But readers with highbrow tastes may want to make an exception to their usual literary fare on account of its social criticism.”
Read these and my other book reviews on New York Journal of Books.
New York Jewish fiction writer Susan Daitch's third novel Paper Conspiracies, which was published last week by City Lights Books, takes an indirect approach to late Nineteenth Century France's Dreyfus Affair by way of peripheral minor actors in the scandal and via cinema pioneer Georges Mèliés' contemporaneous dramtized documentary film L'affaire Dreyfus . The novel's six sections alternate between 1990s New York and Paris in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1968. In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I enthusiastically recommend the book "to fans of highbrow, erudite historical fiction. Readers who enjoy the novels of Umberto Eco, for example, will probably also enjoy those of Ms. Daitch.” I also draw an analogy between late Nineteenth Century French anti-Semitism and Twentyfirst Century American Islamophobia.
In my New York Journal of Books review I describe the book as “. . . a plot-driven novel conveyed in crisp, descriptive, and thought-provoking prose via an engagingly intelligent third-person narrator. . . . an auspicious debut” and recommend it to both adult and precocious young adult readers. via examiner.com
In my New York Journal of Books review I quote Ms. Miller, "Every new piece of information keeps me on the road to the ever-expanding possibility of the quest, a quest that in the end will still yield only partial knowledge--and will never give me, return to me, those past lives." Ms. Miller, a retired CUNY Graduate Center English and Comparative Literature professor, is an appealing prose stylist, but because of its focus on the genalogical search process this book will mostly appeal to genealogy buffs in general and Jewish genealogy buffs in particular.
Continue reading on Examiner.com
“Looking for an anthology of erotic texts to accompany masturbation? Look elsewhere.”
"Aspiring fiction writers who would rather not write sex scenes but whose plots or character development require that they do, may find this book a useful guide, especially if they share its author’s taste in literature in general and erotic literature in particular."
My review concludes with an expression of gratitude to author Jennifer Grotz for sharing her inner life and its conflicts via her mind’s eye and poet’s ear in The Needle.
