Reviews

Bookshots: 'No Mercy' by Eleanor Learmonth and Jenny Tabakoff

December 1st, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: No Mercy – True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality

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Making Sense of Brainiac Steven Pinker's New Book on Writing

November 24th, 2014

It’s not news that I love grammar, so it shouldn’t surprise any of you that I totally freaked out when I learned that author/experimental psychologist/cognitive scientist/linguist Steven Pinker had a new book about writing. Frankly, I had only read snippets of Steven Pinker’s other well-known books—The Stuff of Thought and The Blank Slate—and was only just a little familiar with his style of writing and subject matter. What got me all hot and bothered was the title!

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Bookshots: "Asura Girl" by Otaro Maijo

November 18th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: Asura Girl Who Wrote It? Award-winning Japanese novelist and illustrator Otaro Maijo. Asura Girl won the Mishima Yukio Prize in 2003. It was translated by Stephen Snyder.

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Bookshots: 'The Annotated Mixtape' by Joshua Harmon

November 11th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Annotated Mixtape

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Bookshots: 'The End of Days' by Jenny Erpenbeck

November 10th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The End of Days Who wrote it? I got very lucky with this book. I could have picked a different book to review, and maybe that review would have somehow led to my death. Jenny Erpenbeck, an award-winning German author (translation by Susan Bernofsky)

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Bookshots: 'The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure' edited by C.D. Rose

November 6th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure Who wrote it: Focus too much on the rules...and these are the consequences. Failure. Of the most spectacular kind. Depends on how you look at it. Maybe these writers wrote their own stories. Or maybe the writers don't exist at all. Either way, editor C.D. Rose is responsible for cobbling together the entries.

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Bookshots: 'Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves' by Carolyn Chute

November 5th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Who wrote it? Perhaps best known for her first novel, The Beans of Egypt Maine (which was made into a movie), Carolyn Chute is an author and political activist known for her passionate defense of the right to bear arms set out in the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution.

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Bookshots: 'Miracle Girls' by M.B. Caschetta

November 5th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: Miracle Girls

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Bookshots: 'The Sleepworker' by Cyrille Martinez

November 4th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Sleepworker                             Who wrote it? Cyrille Martinez, a poet and novelist who is lucky enough to live in Paris, the jammy bugger*.

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Bookshots: 'Shark' by Will Self

November 4th, 2014

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: Shark Who wrote it? A journey of language, of character, of unsettling fragmented narratives, of tricks, twists and turns. Will Self, the man behind works such as The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Great Apes and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2012. Shark is Self's eleventh novel.

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