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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…