Baca’s ‘A Glass of Water’ the work of blistering passion
It was in prison, where he served six and a half years in his twenties, a portion of that on death row, that Baca began his literary career, trading poems to fellow inmates for cigarettes.
Book review: ‘The First Way of War’
John Grenier is one of those historians working to correct the record, and his The First Way of War begins, appropriately enough for any overview of American military history, with the wars waged by the first English colonies in North America in 1607, and runs all the way through the Creek War of 1813-1814.
Book review: ‘Tree of Smoke’
The novel whole novel reads like that, like a titanic pastiche of all its sources, but with rhythm all its own, illuminating not only the war, but also the incredible mythmaking surrounding it.
Book review: ‘Shimmer’
Shimmer’s protagonist, Robbie Case, is the CEO and founder of Core Communications, a twenty billion dollar company built on a visionary new technology that allows the transfer of data at unparalleled speed. The only problem being that the technology doesn’t work.
Book review: Yu’s stories as moving as they are disturbing
Each of Charles Yu’s meticulously crafted stories is an experiment in form, expanding in different ways on the themes of fragmented identity and alienation.
Book review: ‘In the Light of You’
Nathan Singer’s Nazis are a different breed than Vonnegut’s. His protagonist, Mikal Fanon, is a poor white Kentucky boy who is, as a teenager, moved by his burn-out parents to a poor black neighborhood in an unnamed Ohio city.
Book review: ‘The Death of Bunny Munro’
Whether writing screenplays, novels, or songs, sex and death – the grislier the better – form Cave’s raison d’être.
