Category: Book Reviews

True Enough

I wrote about Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society for CrunchGear. Click here to read the entire piece. Manjoo’s text is intriguing. He points out how, as people, we have always had a tendency to believe what we want to believe. However, recent technological advances make it easier for us…

continue reading

Ouch

Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic of The Chicago Sun Times eviscerates Ian Christie’s Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga. I read the book the day it was first released and didn’t find it to be that bad. It wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but I didn’t think it was awful. My main criticism…

continue reading

14-and-a-Half Pages for the Most Complex Components of Fiction Writing

  I’ve been pretty hard on writing/publishing books. Far too many of them are just garbage. And I’ve been pretty vocal about the titles that comprise my Mount Rushmore of writing texts. An interesting new addition to the discussion is Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.

continue reading

New York Times Reviews

A couple of reviews in the New York Times yesterday caught my attention. James Poniewozik reviewed Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and found it “perceptive and and darkly entertaining.” And Walter Kirn reviewed William Vollman’s newest book, Poor People. Kirn makes an interesting point that Vollman’s own motives in all of his adventurous…

continue reading

Review: The Garbageman and the Prostitute

  My review of The Garbageman and the Prostitute by Zack Wentz appeared on PopMatters last Friday. If you didn’t see it, be sure to check out the entire piece here. And we’ll let Zack keep on keeping on here at Slushpile.net since he was kind enough to interview Kevin Sampsell for me. Check out the next…

continue reading