Vincent Czyz

Book Review: “Master Lovers” — An Inventive and Intelligent Fictional Memoir

January 18, 2024
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“Master Lovers” is written in a lucid, personable style, and the fictional scenes —  David Winner’s recreations of history and imagined trysts — are deft, believable, and vividly imagined.

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Book Review: “The Geography of the Imagination” — Longing for Something Lost

January 14, 2024
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Touted as “perhaps the last great American polymath,” Guy Davenport had a singular mind; never was an artist more deserving of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”

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Book Review: “Rodney Kills at Night” — Engaging Company

August 5, 2023
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Poe Ballantine is often compared to Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac. I’d say he’s closer to the former than the latter, but he’s more polished than either and funnier than both put together.

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Book Review: “The Archeology of a Good Ragù” — A “Bipolar” Memoir

March 20, 2022
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Rather than the usual story of assimilation, John Domini gives us a deftly written narrative of return, self-discovery, disillusionment, personal metamorphosis, and ultimately, rejection.

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Book Review: “Punch Me Up to the Gods” — Stories That Need to be Told

November 30, 2021
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A stunning indictment of homophobia, racism, and toxic masculinity, particularly among African Americans, Punch Me Up to the Gods holds a mirror up to America, a mirror before which many of us will not want to linger.

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Book Review: Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren” — A Critical War of Words

November 23, 2021
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The jury’s in. The critics who agreed with an early assessment that 1975’s Dhalgren is a “literary landmark” get to touch champagne flutes and congratulate one another.

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Book Review: “Blue Swan Black Swan” — Madness Made Beautiful

September 16, 2021
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Whether we call this slim volume poetic prose or prose poetry, a novella or a collection of verse, seems beside the point. It is haunting, hypnotic, and moving.

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Book Review: “Disquiet” — A Compassionate Litany of Tragedies in the Middle East

July 28, 2021
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This is a timely novel, a lament for the multicultural harmony that has disappeared from Mesopotamia as well as a dire warning: fundamentalism is on the rise, not just in the Middle East but in the West as well.

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Poetry Review: “Any Song Will Do” — A Very Worthwhile Discovery

November 6, 2020
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Donald Levering’s poems exhort us to be less left-brained, to side more often with intuition, creativity, flights of fancy.

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Book Review: “And Go Like This” — Short Stories of Distinction

September 4, 2020
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The stories in And Go Like This are wise, compassionate, and deftly crafted.

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