Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941, Ashgate, 2014. $134.95, 302 pages.
This dense monograph—a fifth of it is notes and critical apparatus—represents a great deal of work. Holman provides the reader …
Book Review
Battleborn
Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins. Riverhead Books, 2012. $16, 288 pages.
With the Mojave Desert as her set and vibrant characters as her stars, Watkins’s collection is an almost filmic bricolage of survival in an unforgiving landscape. Watkins’s stories …
Dollbaby
Dollbaby, by Laura Lane McNeal. Viking, 2014. $26.95, 337 pages.
In her debut novel, author Laura Lane McNeal maps out the city of New Orleans in order to imagine a gripping tale of family secrets, civil rights, and Southern …
A World of Objects
Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, by Jeanne E. Arnold, et al. The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012. $24.95, 180 pages.
A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor. …
Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption
Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption, by Robert Appelbaum. Zero Books, 2014. $22.95, 242 pages.
Some books make you want to write. Other books make you want to read—either things by the same author, or things on the …
The Escape Artist
J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, by Thomas Beller. New Harvest, 2014. $20, 192 pages.
J.D. Salinger wasn’t in the middle school canon where I grew up. Ventura, California, for most of my life, was a gerrymandered center-right political district. So …
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
An experiment with the form of the nineteenth-century-style review: mega-long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, by Katherine Anne Porter. Random House, 1936.
Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell tried to persuade Charlotte Brontë—whose grim experience of the …
The Pedestrians
The Pedestrians, by Rachel Zucker. Wave Books, 2014. $18, 143 pages.
“How can any mother write an epic?” asks Rachel Zucker in her most recent poetry collection, The Pedestrians. Filled with fables, dreams, and ruminations, the book quivers …
Q
Q, by Bill Lavender. Trembling Pillow Press, 2013. $16.95, 196 pages.
In his introduction to the 1998 Dalkey Archive Press volume entitled Innovations: an Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Robert McLaughlin, countering old fuddy-duddy F.R. Leavis, makes …
All Men Are Liars
All Men Are Liars, by Alberto Manguel (translated by Miranda France). Riverhead Books, 2012. $16, 224 pages.
Argentinean writer Alberto Manguel’s novel All Men Are Liars contains a series of intertwining interviews about the infamous Alejandro Bevilacqua. The novel …
