Hollywood Babylon: A Review of Ross McMeekin’s “The Hummingbirds”

The opening image of Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, captivated audiences when it premiered in 1950: a man’s corpse floating in a swimming pool owned by a faded Hollywood starlet. How did he end up there? Who killed him? The tone was ominous, the danger real, yet due to decades of screen and print copycats, the same scene today has become a crime story cliché—think, for instance, of the needlepoint parody of the facedown murder victim in the […]

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Reduced to Gravel: On Paul Auster and the Isolationist Wall

In his 1990 novel, The Music of Chance, Paul Auster explores the use of stones and barriers as plot and metaphorical devices in telling the story of two men, Jim and Jack, who are forced into the construction of an ornamental stone wall after accruing a gambling debt to a pair of eccentric millionaires. If this sounds a bit wild, it is certainly meant to, for the novel toys with absurdity. But The Music of Chance, when paired with Auster’s […]

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Digging Deep into the Strange: A Review of Amber Sparks’s “The Unfinished World” and Nance Van Winckel’s “Ever Yrs”

In her new collection, The Unfinished World, Amber Sparks continues to evolve as an idiosyncratic storyteller, offering nineteen stories that crisscross genre and mood and that elevate her to the upper echelon of young American short fiction writers. Sparks’ work finds comfort in juxtaposing perceived normalcy with the bizarre, and it flourishes in catching the reader off-guard, usually with unexpected character actions or logic. Stories like the sublime “Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting” and “The Men and Women Like […]

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Belief and Betrayal: A Review of Vanessa Blakeslee’s “Train Shots”

Train Shots by Vanessa Blakeslee (Burrow Press, 145 p.) About halfway through “Welcome, Lost Dogs,” one of the eleven stories that make up Vanessa Blakeslee’s fine debut collection, Train Shots, a woman, after receiving a telephone tip, drives to a ramshackle Costa Rican town to retrieve a handful of dogs recently stolen from her property. She brings along one of her maids, as well as a firearm. Their destination is a dirty, graffiti covered soda; the area is riddled with […]

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The Character Voice of Barry Hannah

Had a heart attack not cut him down in 2010, Barry Hannah would be turning 72 this year. And, as is wont to happen after an artist’s death, Hannah’s writing has slowly found new appreciation in both the old and new guard of American writers. Known for his grimly comic narratives and pinball velocity, what makes Hannah’s work so consistently interesting is the fact that, quite often, it’s his use of character voice and personality that enthralls the reader. These […]

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