There is at the core of the American writing tradition an interest in haunts, specters, and otherworldliness as they allow play, or what Hawthorne refers to as “a certain latitude” in fashion and form. Jac Jemc’s latest book on FSG Originals, The Grip of It, seems to me to honor this tradition while finding its own voice. On the surface, the book is a haunted house story—the story of a couple who move away from the rush and clank of […]
“A Book Trapped In Thought”: A Review of M. Kitchell’s “Hour of the Wolf”
One of the first books to come from the mysterious but promising new press, Inside the Castle, is M. Kitchell’s Hour of the Wolf. Deceivingly thin, Hour of the Wolf is a dense assemblage of an incredibly readable but decentering book. Kitchell divides the books between cycles (first, second, third, fourth, and final). However, before and after the reader arrives at the first cycle, Kitchell’s book begins a slow transition into the dark of dreamless nights. Beginning with a […]
A Harrowing Empathy: Cynan Jones’s “The Long Dry,” Reviewed
The Long Dry by Cynan Jones is the third book that Coffee House Press has released in the United States and though it doesn’t have some of the mystery and action that provides a sense of urgency to his previous novel, Everything I Found on the Beach, The Long Dry is still a driving novel in its own right, which is due in some part to the slim chapters and clever sequencing of the book.
“A Force in American Literature”: Matt Bell’s “A Tree or a Person or a Wall” Reviewed
Matt Bell has become a force in American literature and this is in no small part due to his flexibility in style. His latest collection of stories A Tree or a Person or a Wall is perhaps the most comprehensive example of his stylistic diversity. The collection begins with the title story “A Tree or a Person or a Wall,” which is a story about a boy that finds himself captive in a room with a rather temperamental albino ape. […]
Motherless Children Are Pure Crow: A Review of Max Porter’s “Grief is the Thing with Feathers”
Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a heartbreaking work that riffs off Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers” emptying it of its signification, filling it with black feathers, cursing crows, and loss. What I find most fascinating about the book is the very thing I didn’t seem to care for when I began reading. He lays symbolic representation naked upon the page in such a way that the reader must struggle with the overt […]
As He Plays, Darkness Rising: A Review of Rikki Ducornet’s “Brightfellow”
Rikki Ducornet is a national treasure. She has birthed over twenty-three books, illustrated, taught, edited, and contributed greatly to the direction of contemporary American fiction. Brightfellow, her latest book on Coffee House Press, has been touted as her most accessible novel. Many novice readers struggle with Ducornet’s unbridled imagination (the whirling of the universe with all of its microcosms on the tip of a pin) Though I don’t find her work to be necessarily inaccessible, they certainly require an active […]
A Story Told With Striking Language and Visceral Detail: A Review of Cynan Jones’s “Everything I Found on the Beach”
Cynan Jones’ novel Everything I Found on the Beach, was his second novel in the British Isles released after The Long Dry, which made garnered some favorable reviews after it was published in 2006 and reprinted by Granta in 2014. It is also the second Jones novel published by Coffee House Press (his first with Coffee House Press was The Dig, which Granta published in 2014). Structurally, Everything I Found on the Beach doesn’t break any new ground, as mainly […]
“Some Dark Eden Where Characters Grow”: A Review of Brian Evenson’s “A Collapse of Horses”
I find myself in a rather complicated relationship with short stories. It is a very unforgiving form. A novel is a bit like a nesting doll. It contains stories within stories and allows for micro successes in ways that a short story often cannot. Certainly, my bookshelves are lined with collections of short stories, but I always reach first for a novel as I’m often more prone to long narratives that provide me an opportunity to lose myself in the […]