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Daniel Green
Interests: Good writing, creative and critical.
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Posted Aug 25, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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Making Something
Edmond Caldwell's Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant (Say It With Stones) is a much worthier and more accomplished book than 99% of what is published as "literary fiction" by most "name" publishers. It takes numerous risks, both formally and thematically, but it also manages to be entertaining without conceding to conventional notions... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Not Somewhere or Anywhere
The publication of Ottessa Moshfegh’s story collection, Homesick for Another World, does not so much allow us to measure the progress of this writer’s talent following on her first two published books, the novella McGlue and the novel Eileen, the latter of which in particular generated considerable enthusiasm among readers... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Formally Restless
In her 2015 New York Times review of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo, Heidi Julavits complained that the stories in the book “do not cut downward or inward, instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates.” On the one hand, this seems to signal an impatience with the stories’ resistance to... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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On A.M. Homes
The books that brought A.M. Homes her initial notoriety (and her work did become rather notorious), the story collection The Safety of Objects (1990) and the novel The End of Alice (1996) are clearly designed to provoke, especially in their choice of subjects. The first story in The Safety of... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Aimee Bender and the Surrealist Fable
There are really two writers at work in the fiction of Aimee Bender. First and most conspicuously we find the fabulist, who frequently invests her stories with a surface surrealism by evoking fables and fairy tales. The surreal qualities of her tales might be more pronounced and extreme (a human... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Soaked in Meaning
It was perhaps inevitable that Ben Marcus’s fiction would come to seem more conventional following on his first book, The Age of Wire and String (1995), which could be taken either as a collection of short pieces employing a common subject and method or as a novel, and which surely... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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The Entropic City
Although nothing definitive can be said about prevailing assumptions in American writing by considering any particular first novel, Eric Lundgren’s The Facades seems to reflect an understanding of what makes a work of fiction “unconventional.” Whether such an understanding arises from influences absorbed in a creative writing program, through the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Entering Cross River
Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You is both continuous with his first collection of short fiction, Insurrections (2016), and a significant departure. Most obviously, both books offer stories set in Cross River, a fictional Maryland town outside of Washington D.C. The characters, almost exclusively African-American, in both collections... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Sad and Bad and Mad: The Fiction of Rosalyn Drexler
Perhaps it is because her most lasting accomplishment may turn out to be her paintings that Rosalyn Drexler is now so very little known as a writer of fiction. Although she did attract attention with her novels in the 1970s, and her plays gained notice for their association with the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Fidelity to the Isolated Moment
Although the influence of Gordon Lish as editor and teacher has extended to a wide range of seemingly disparate writers, one group seems to be especially sensitive to Lish’s influence. Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways,... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Modernism Redux
Contemporary fiction has so thoroughly returned to observing convention in prose style and storytelling that a novel imitating less conventional strategies used by writers a hundred years ago is hailed as “radical.” This is the only explanation I can understand for the rapturous reception accorded Eimear McBride’s A Girl is... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Ideas as My Map
In his review of Siri Hustvedt’s 2008 novel, The Sorrows of an American, Ron Charles calls it “a radically postmodern novel.” This is a rather astonishing claim. Although this novel could be described as somewhat fragmented, containing numerous flashbacks and some interpolated documents, primarily a journal kept by the narrator’s... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Living in Language
If we would expect a novel written by an accomplished poet to exhibit a gift for language beyond what we find in most fiction, then Joshua Corey’s Beautiful Soul certainly meets our expectations. Indeed, this gift is apparent literally from the novel’s beginning: Black screen. A flicker. The letter: In... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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A Sensation of Hollowness
In a review of the novel in Review 31, Helen McClory makes a curious criticism of Helen DeWitt's 2011 novel, Lightning Rods: What it lacks is interiority. The narration, because it is so slick and over-worked, has the feel of a voice-over; it's all surface, even when we are ostensibly... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Getting It All In
The response to Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity included numerous references to the book as "postmodern," "innovative," or "absurdist," terms that by now are mostly used to indicate that the work at hand is not a conventional work of "realism." Often postmodernist and realist seem to be the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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On Joshua Ferris
For all of the ambivalence it seems to provoke in many readers and critics, the American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s (with scattered precursors in the 1950s and and a few lingering appearances in the 1980s) that probably will now permanently be called "postmodern" continues to make its influence... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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On the Fiction of Dawn Raffel
Dawn Raffel is now probably best known for her 2012 book, The Secret Life of Objects, an unorthodox memoir in which the author invokes her past through reflections prompted by various objects she still possesses. While this book succeeds on its own terms, offering a concise but affecting account of... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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The Desire to Know
Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields will no doubt be labeled a “political” novel, but that would serve only to bind this novel to an already ill-defined concept (when applied to literature) that becomes even more opaque at a time when political awareness has become especially urgent and we are frequently told... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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The Telling and the Tale
Since its publication in the UK in 2018, its capture of the Booker Prize, and its subsequent publication in the United States, Anna Burns’ Milkman has provoked sharply divergent responses. It has received numerous highly laudatory reviews, but also several high-profile negative reviews, most notably in The Times and the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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The Telling and the Tale
Since its publication in the UK in 2018, its capture of the Booker Prize, and its subsequent publication in the United States, Anna Burns’ Milkman has provoked sharply divergent responses. It has received numerous highly laudatory reviews, but also several high-profile negative reviews, most notably in The Times and the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 22, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Down Here Below the Tropopause
Each of Jeremy M. Davies's first two novels, Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (2014), emphatically reject the notion that, in fiction, form serves content, proceeding instead as each of them do by establishing a form to which narrative content must accommodate itself. Rose Alley especially subordinates its "story" to the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 22, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Profusions of Prose
Readers who may have shied away from Joshua Cohen’s previous novel, Witz (2010), because of its daunting length (over 800 pages) and presumed difficulty will probably find his new novel, Book of Numbers, rather less intimidating and more accessible, if not exactly an airport book. At a mere 600 pages... Continue reading
Posted Aug 22, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Profusions of Prose
Readers who may have shied away from Joshua Cohen’s previous novel, Witz (2010), because of its daunting length (over 800 pages) and presumed difficulty will probably find his new novel, Book of Numbers, rather less intimidating and more accessible, if not exactly an airport book. At a mere 600 pages... Continue reading
Posted Aug 22, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Making Poems of the Words
If Melanie Rae Thon is a writer less widely read than might be expected, given her skill in creating vivid characters and evoking an equally vivid sense of place, among the reasons for this would surely be the sheer intensity of her work, which can at times seem unremitting, even... Continue reading
Posted Aug 22, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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