Author Archives: admin

Signs and Wonders, by Alix Ohlin

Posted on by

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.

[more]

Freedom and Ms. Hempel

Posted on by

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.

[more]

Game of Dreams

Posted on by

Last night, my wife and I started catching up with the current season of Game of Thrones.  Which is, for those who don’t know the show, a daunting task.  How many kings are there, now, exactly?  And who were Ned Stark’s children again?  I’d forgotten that he’s also referred to as Eddard.  And Stannis who?  The melodramatic woman on the beach, the poisoned old guy, dragons and subtitles and bastards and direwolves…my brain cries uncle.

Two and a Half Men isn’t really that bad of a show, is it?  Save me, Ashton Kutcher, with your silly muggings and stupid lines.

Anyway, Game of Thrones is astonishingly epic, and maybe that’s why I had another very vivid dream last night.  It goes something like this:

I’m at a New Order concert with my great writer friend Ed Lin.  (Sorry, Ed, for pulling you into this mess.)  This makes sense, as I’ve read one of Ed’s posts about seeing Peter Hook (former member of New Order) a while back.  So there we are, listening to New Order, when I see Hilary Duff sitting a few rows away.  As far as I know, I’ve spent a total of 1.42 seconds of my life thinking about Hilary Duff (probably an overestimate), but here she is, not only sitting there but looking right at me, staring hard.

“It’s because she’s missing her dog,” Ed says, as if this made all the sense in the world.  (FYI, after seeing Game of Thrones, we saw the episode of Veep “Catherine,” where a dog is prominently featured in the storyline.)

At this point, I notice that everyone has a tattoo on their arm.  We received it as we entered the concert, I guess as some sort of a validating stamp?  On mine, it is a bunch of stars against a charcoal background.  The stars are moving, streaking.  I feel like dancing, I get up…

…and I’m hanging out with Janet Jackson.  (At the supermarket yesterday, I may have seen her on a magazine cover [verified via Google — Prevention, July 2012!].)  Onlookers on the street gawk at us, and I feel cool and important.  We enter a nail salon, where all the nail ladies do the nails while lying on fancily made beds.  The client is supposed to climb into bed with the nail ladies, but Janet politely refuses, so she sits in a chair while the nail lady awkwardly leans over to do Janet’s nails.

Then Janet and I are going back to the concert, and we are being followed by the nail lady and a big tough guy, both of them looking pissed.  The big guy takes out a tape measure, runs up to Janet, and starts measuring her head and back without asking for permission.  I try to stop him, and he pulls out a gun.  We run…

…back to the concert.  The door slams shut, and a man gives me a baseball bat.  The bat feels excellent in my hands.  With this bat, I can protect people.

And that’s when I wake up.

Dreams are awesome.