-
Roger Ebert in Review
When Roger Ebert announced last week that he’d be taking a “leave of presence” from his writing due to his declining health, even readers who knew he’d been in rough shape since his hip fracture last December were stunned. For those of us who grew up with Siskel & Ebert as a staple of late…
-
Touching from a distance: On Sam Pink’s Rontel
Reviewed in this essay: Rontel, by Sam Pink, Electric Literature, 2013. One of the old canards people trot out when waxing (prematurely) on the creeping death of the publishing industry is that there’s just no way to sell books anymore, not when brick and mortar stores are on the wane and even the once future-proof…
-
Post-apocalyptic collaboration: A review of Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home
Reviewed in this essay: The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, by Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman, Wattpad, 2013. “I dabble in modernity,” Margaret Atwood joked to George Stroumboulopoulos when pressed to explain her recent foray into online self-publishing on Wattpad. Wattpad is a YouTube for digital scribblings, a free online database where writers can instantly upload and…
-
Tradition and the Debut Talent: On David Balzer’s Contrivances
Reviewed in this essay: Contrivances, by David Balzer. Joyland/ECW Press, 2012. Towards the end of “Laura,” one of the punchiest short stories in David Balzer’s sterling first collection Contrivances, Whitney looks on the work of her artist mother and muses that “it seemed to draw on precedent just enough to be legible.” That allowance for the…
-
Taking Turns: A Review of Margaret Atwood’s I’m Starved for You
Reviewed in this essay: I’m Starved for You, by Margaret Atwood. Byliner, 2012. Margaret Atwood’s latest dystopia trades The Handmaid’s Tale’s theocratic republic and Oryx and Crake’s bioengineered wasteland for more familiar locales. Set in the gated community of Consilience, a think tank-generated portmanteau of “cons” and “resilience,” the mordantly funny I’m Starved for You (an…