 | This excellent collection of stories is all over the (midwestern) map, from the fantastic to the contemplative, the surreal to the corporeal. The narratives are strikingly original and feature some of the most innovative storytelling I've seen in some time. Recommended for short story lovers, natives of this part of the continent, and strangers seeking the strange in the Midwest. [Tristan] |
 | I'm sort of embarrassed about how much I like Michael Lewis. I mean, he wrote a book that was turned into a Sandra Bullock movie for pete's sake! But he keeps writing such great books. Never has a more boring subject--mortgage backed securities!-been covered in a more intriguing way. The Big Short (along with NPR's This American Life coverage) represent the best journalism on this insanely dull topic. [KC] |
Selected Stories by Robert Walser; trans. by Christopher Middleton
 | So many towering figures have sung the praises of Robert Walser--including Kafka, Waler Benjamin, and Herman Hesse--that it almost seems superfluous to add my humble two cents. But these stories are so fantastic that I just couldn' stop myself. In lyric prose, Walser brings together the sublime and the profane, the comic and the melancholic, the mundane and the fantastic, to create a world where dreams, folktales, and every day life meet in whispers and explosions. [Alex] |
 | I don't miss where I came from. While living in the suburbs, I was always comforted by the idea that the lives of neighbors were as empty as they seemed. But Dutton has filled all of the supposed emptiness of suburbia with a flood of thought and feeling. Her protagonist's powerful stream of consciousness peeks inward and outward, bringing her marriage, her world, and herself into powerfully shifting focus, as if she was passing everything around her under a microscope for the span of a second. This is a truly disturbing book, and it makes me damn nervous. [Jeff] |
 | Lorrie Moore's newest novelis as pun-ny as ever with characters confusing asteroids with hemmorhoidsm the rock band Sleater-Kinney with "that cancer hospital in New York." Tassie is Moore's everywoman starting her first year of college, moving away from her small farm upbringing and working for an odd family as a baby-sitter. But the book is much more than its seemingly humble plot. Tassie's voice is addictive and charming and Moore's narration is wonderfully perceptive and wise. Be patient with this book and you'll not regret it. [Hannah] |
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