Customer Comments

The Free is a seemingly effortless work about folks we all know, or are, trying to survive these days, paycheck to paycheck. It's the first piece of fiction in a long, long time to make my eyes well up.

This City of Bohane is a tragedy bursting with full-blown characters, more than a dash of treachery, and a stir of gallows humor, y'sketch? Heed the language, Ireland circa 2053-54, and close your yap, it's hanging open. Kevin Barry and his first novel. The real thing.

One of Boyle's best with characters vividly human - foibles and strengths on full display - let loose in a story rich with his Rube Goldberg-esque machinations and where nature always has the final say.

Jennifer Egan, with "...Goon Squad," makes fiction exciting again!

Although this was my big (brick) summer read - interspersed with lit noir here and there - it is one dang great lit bio. Blotner, who taught with Faulkner at the University of Virginia in the 1950s, appears to have the great man nailed, his brilliant and questionable aspects entered into one big wordy diamond. Shine on, Mr. Faulkner.

Roth, I believe, has said this novel is not a parable. What does he know - he just wrote it. An alternate universe America with a President Lindbergh - as horrific as the eight years under President Bush.

A woman I knew once asked, after reading one of John Updike's Rabbit tomes, "Do men really think that way?" It was with an admixture of honest embarrassment and daffy testosteronical pride that I replied in the affirmative. After reading The Complete Henry Bech, Updike's grand collection of short stories on his reportedly second self, Bech, the Jewish, non-prolific novelist, essayist, short story writer, and poet, I could be asked, "Do writers really think that way?" And I would have to respond, "Yes, if they're being honest." I am only left wondering what Henry Bech is up to these days at 85. Please, Mr. Updike, say it isn't so, that "His Oeuvre" is not the last Bech story...

If you wish to take a break from Hardball and Countdown and this year's candidates, take a trip back one century and glimpse real hardball politics and twisted family values with Progressive Party legend Fighting Bob La Follette, wife Belle Chase La Follette - first woman to graduate from the UW Law School - the kids, and a host of Republicans and Democratics from the hoary past. Ah, politics - it ain't changed much at all!

These short stories are strangely straightforward and lifelike, tracking relationships that are here and gone, dreamlike, occasionally nightmarish.