Short Takes

Q&A with Natalie Chanin in the Wall Street Journal where she mentions the Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook: "The Southern Foodways Alliance did a beautiful community cookbook. I love the stories in it, and the recipes are cookable."

Narrative features both an interview with Marcia Aldrich and a review of her new book, COMPANION TO AN UNTOLD STORY. "COMPANION TO AN UNTOLD STORY, winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, is ultimately a meditation on memory and mystery. Released from event sequence, its approach searching but indirect, like poetry, Aldrich’s memoir is compulsively readable and surprisingly moving."

According to ForeWord, COMPANION TO AN UNTOLD STORY is "haunting, fascinating, funny, and intensely mournful. . . a stellar work. . ."

Listen here for Marcia Aldrich's interview on WUNC's "The Story." The piece on COMPANION TO AN UNTOLD STORY begins a little more than halfway through the program.

An enthusiastic review of E. J. Levy's LOVE, IN THEORY appears on the Unabridged Chick blog. The reviewer "loved [the book], in reality, not theory," calling it "marvelously crafted fiction, tight and emotional, pretty and captivating."

Amos Lassen has a heartfelt review of LOVE, IN THEORY over on his blog. "Here is the heart that is aware of itself and what it does and the book is a lesson in love that woos the reader as he turns the pages."

WBHM 90.3 has an interview with THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE REDNECK RIVIERA author Harvey H. Jackson III on the "Tapestry" program. The interview is available for download here.

"The most striking effect of Idra Novey’s newest collection [EXIT, CIVILIAN] is the collage of voices and emotions she collects so austerely, creating what feels like a very considered mode that reflects the prisons she’s contemplating — ‘critiquing’ seems too simplistic a term."—White Walls / Black Ink

On Land That I Live, Idra Novey answers questions about a couple of her books, including EXIT, CIVILIAN.

The poems’ surreal elements also seem to play a role in escaping a type of mental or perceptual prison. When did you begin to experiment with stepping outside reality in your writing?
 
When I started writing, I never wrote surrealism, but actually the more I wrote about the things I knew, the more surreal the poems became. The things I cared about intimately, I somehow couldn’t write about them unless I wrote about them as taking place in some sort of invented, imaginary world. That felt truer to me. I think to get at the emotional truth, I needed to get away in some ways from the biographical, straight up, concrete truth. For me, straight realism didn’t allow me to get to the nuances of the emotional reality. I like playing with a world where you don’t know when it’s going to leave reality and when you don’t know when it’s going to go from surreal back to reality. I like that slippery space in between.

The Sun News Network praises O M Brack Jr.'s edition of THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL. D., saying it "does an excellent job at noting errors in Hawkins’ account, and also at explaining things that were commonplace in the eighteenth century but now known only to experts."