News

Patrick Maxwell on Devin Jacobsen’s stories:

“If for nothing else, you should read Devin Jacobsen’s short story collection The Summer We Ate Off the China for its wonderful prose…. We are in a similar, slightly deranged world to the early stories of Will Self. The grains of the ordinary are inverted and perverted…. This is a book about language and its power, and the more enjoyable and interesting for it.”

—Patrick Maxwell, in The Big Issue

A review of Devin Jacobsen’s The Summer We Ate Off the China:

“[Devin Jacobsen has a] willingness to experiment. He’s not afraid to take out the English language for rambling country drives, his excursions sometimes touched by hairpin turns…. Perhaps no one since John Kennedy Toole has marshaled such a menagerie of characters and settings to tell a tale.”

—Danny Heitman, in The Times-Picayune

Publishers Weekly chimes in about David Collard’s upcoming A Crumpled Swan:

“[Collard’s] meticulous exegesis illustrates how even a brief poem can contain untold layers of meaning. It’s a rousing celebration of the power of literature.”

—Publishers Weekly

In the Village Voice, A review of Devin Jacobsen’s The Summer We Ate Off the China:

“A terrific collection—wide, deep, and way hipper than John Irving. Jacobsen writes about big issues and small towns, but he always writes beautifully…. a writer worth discovering.”

—Gideon Leek, in The Village Voice

Kirkus Reviews on David Collard’s forthcoming collection of fifty essays on poetry, A Crumpled Swan:

“50 brief, illuminating essays melding memoir, close reading, literary analysis, and cultural criticism…. Collard’s insightful essays reveal him, as well, as a sympathetic presence, sensitive and wise. Fresh, perceptive literary essays.”

—Kirkus Reviews

In Write Now Philly, Ronan Brinkley “explores ownership vs. love” in C.J. Spataro’s More Strange Than True:

“Short, strange and sweet, More Strange Than True will break your heart and sew it back together again.”

—Ronan Brinkley, in Write Now Philly

Jackie Law weighs in on Kat Meads’ While Visiting Babette in Never Imitate:

“While Visiting Babette is an intriguing novelette that sends the reader down a rabbit hole reminiscent of wonderland. Unlike Alice’s experiences, the various characters are human albeit with habits and outlooks that remain unexplained. This never detracts from what is a largely surreal snapshot of life inside a locked facility as experienced by the inmates…. Their world is one of doors and windows, of ponds and insects. There are games and stories, most of which make little sense except to the players. And yet the reader is carried through each of their thoughts and pursuits. Moments of violence are mostly tempered with a dash of piquant humour…. Original but also engaging. A rare little story that rewards careful reading.”

—Jackie Law, in Never Imitate

Books by Women has published an essay by Kat Meads about writing her novella, While Visiting Babette:

“Not to give too much of the plot away: someone does try to escape in While Visiting Babette. And that someone succeeds.”

Vincent Czyz in The Arts Fuse on John Patrick Higgins’ Fine:

“Higgins is a deft writer whose prose often displays a spare lyricism…. I doubt there’s a page that went by that I didn’t laugh at least once [but] the novel is not without tragedy…. While loneliness, aging, and death are overriding concerns in the novel, Fine also takes on the winner-take-all society Western capitalism has manufactured…. If you go ahead and pick up a copy of Fine, the worst that’s likely to happen is that some sentence, no matter the page, will make you laugh or giggle or chortle. The best? You get the laughs and, after turning the last page, you’ll find yourself just a smidge more reconciled to one day becoming Aunt Sylvia.”

—Vincent Czyz, in The Arts Fuse

W.J. Davies on The University of Bliss:

“The University of Bliss is a scathing satire of British higher education set in a dystopian near future. [Stannard’s grim comedy] is barely hyperbole…. The world that Stannard depicts is already here…. [A] ferociously funny condemnation of university commercialization and the tyranny of rankings, student satisfaction scores and bureaucracy run amok.”

—W.J. Davies, in Times Literary Supplement