For the sixth time, I have a review in The Georgia Review. For the Summer 2021 issue, I contributed an essay-review of two books that each deal with esoteric philosophy and the art of communication. Check it out!
Month: August 2021
Mirror Work | Be About It Zine #19
My short essay “Mirror Work” appears in Alexandra Naughton’s zine Be About It. You should order a copy! They’re only $3!
The King of Infinite Space by Lyndsay Faye | L.A. Times
Lyndsay Faye plays a kind of literary jazz. The author likes to riff on the standards, putting her own stamp on them as she jams. Her previous novels include inventive takes on Sherlock Holmes (“Dust and Shadow”) and “Jane Eyre” (“Jane Steele”). Her Timothy Wilde detective series and her novel “The Paragon Hotel” infuse a contemporary sensibility into gritty, evocative historical fiction. Continue reading…
What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction
by Alice McDermott | The Boston Globe
(My first review for The Boston Globe! New publications are always exciting, but this one’s particularly meaningful because I lived in Boston for many years and loved it there.)
In “Faith and Literature,” an essay from her first non-fiction collection “What About the Baby?”, the award-winning novelist Alice McDermott explains the origins of her fictional milieu: “I write about a culture I know fairly well in order to resist the siren song of research.” The culture she’s referring to is that of Irish Catholics, mostly in Brooklyn or Long Island, at various points in the twentieth century. McDermott, as one would deduce, was born in Brooklyn and educated in Long Island, the daughter of Irish Catholic parents—“a cradle Catholic,” as she describes herself. She regularly explores the way the past haunts the present, community mythology, alcoholism, and the life-altering effects of grief. Continue reading…
Jonathan Russell Clark 