Monthly Archives: June 2012

Signs and Wonders, by Alix Ohlin

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Check out the reviewlet I wrote for the always wonderful and insightful Fiction Writers Review.

This might not seem like a compliment, but it is: Alix Ohlin is a literary torturer.

In her new collection, Signs and Wonders (Vintage), Ohlin (The Missing Person,Babylon and Other Stories) puts her poor people through the wringer, then takes a wrung-out person and puts him under a flattened-human-sized slide for an intense, revelatory microscopic examination. Then she peels off this pancaked person and twists him like toffee, extracting every last drop of his essence onto the page.

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Freedom and Ms. Hempel

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My essay about two excellent novels at The Nervous Breakdown is now up:

More than a month has passed since I listened to the unabridged recording of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and read the paperback of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles.  To be frank, I’ve been avoiding writing about either of these novels, not because I didn’t like them, but because I feel inadequate even discussing them.  My words, no matter how carefully chosen or artfully rendered, cannot elevate these books any further.  They are two of the finest works of literature I’ve read in years.

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