Claire Keegan’s novella expertly shows how the culture of idle talk in certain Irish communities is like a secret code — an intricate language that both obscures and reveals.
Lucas Spiro
Book Review: Harold Bloom’s Final Testament to the Saving Power of Literature
Here’s to the late Harold Bloom. Do yourself a favor. Get up early (or whenever) and read something that matters.
Book Review: “Savage Kiss” — Children’s Criminal Crusade
Maybe the greatest value of Saviano’s narratives is that they rebuke the complicity of silence; they are acts of dissent that refuse to kowtow to the oppressive omertà.
Book Review: Ken Bruen’s “A Galway Epiphany” — A Vision of Exhaustion
Jack Taylor’s awareness of his own depleted condition is part of A Galway Epiphany’s Beckett-infused drama.
Short Fuse Podcast #30 — Matt & Lucas, Abridged
What happens when the illusive Zoom gods don’t cooperate — a rescue mission.
Book Review: “Murder and the Movies” — So Cinematic, the Spectacle of Death
Our awareness of our delight in the homicidal temptations presented by film is itself a kind of twisted comedy that the critic is all too aware of.
Book Review: “Lake of Urine: A Love Story” — Breaking Established Reality
It’s hard to critique a novel that flies under such a resplendent banner, a wholesale rejection of the dead and decaying world of trends and war and meaninglessness.
Book Review: “The Fallen” — Probing Cuban Paralysis
The Fallen artfully diagnoses the spiritual and material maladies of contemporary Cuban life through the lens of a single family, a household threatened by decay, exterior and interior.
Book Review: “The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana” — A Caribbean Hamlet
Told from the perspective of the Global South, this novel enthralls as it explores the urgent economic and cultural contradictions of post-colonialism, globalization, class, and alienation.
Book Review: “Like Flies from Afar” — A Very Twisted Odyssey
This is hard-hitting neo-noir parable whose dark humor delights as it strikes at the corrupt heart of business as usual in Argentina.