Book Reviews
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“Apartment by Teddy Wayne” Reviewed by LaVonne Roberts
Apartment is Teddy Wayne’s fourth novel and an easy read in just over 200 pages. Wayne’s novel gets to the crux of every writer’s angst in an MFA program: when you strip away the art of craft, is your writing any more interesting than yourself? Offering a rare glimpse of what happens in a workshop and the sheltered creative writer’s MFA community, Apartment speaks to what a privileged, highly-competitive MFA degree does or does not do for a writer. Moreover, it speaks to male identity in relation to male friendship.
Set in 1996,
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“Travelers by Helon Habila” Reviewed by LaVonne Roberts
What is it like to be a refugee? Around the world, 70.8 million people have been forcibly displaced. It’s hard to fathom the terrible extent of the refugee crisis, but Habila captures the humanity of his characters in a way that newspapers can’t. Travelers comes at a time when Americans are being forced to reckon with what our country is becoming, what values we truly hold dear. Habila’s stories parallel anti-immigrant narratives being espoused in the U.S. and globally today.
Helon Habila started working on Travelers in 2013, when in Berlin on a one-year fellowship.
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“The Adjunct Underclass by Herb Childress” Reviewed by Scott Wordsman
What was the adjunct? A dialectical approach to faculty contingency on America’s campuses
There are two distinct points of friction within American higher education, which, if thought about long enough, seem to feed off each other, and have, for decades, been rendering America’s campuses graveyards of critical thought. The first is the transformation of what was traditionally deemed a public good into a commodified entrance pass into the professional world. This, among other absurdities, begets the ubiquitous but what are you going to do with that? question from relatives who couldn’t fathom why anyone would pursue,
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“Deep Time and Dark Spaces: Robert Macfarlane’s Underland” by S.N. Kirby
Under the earth is a world far stranger and far more mystical than our humdrum life here up top. Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, detailing these mysterious underground places, serves as part field guide and magic handbook for us surface dwellers. Underland weaves together a narrative of not just the earth and its underworld, but of the history, the present, and the future of mankind. This is not a book for the claustrophobic.
From the start, Macfarlane directly says that this was a book he intended to be less about humans and more about the mysteries below the earth;
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“The Fragility of Health and Friendship in Rheea Mukherjee’s The Body Myth” by Emily Behnke
Mira, a widowed teacher living alone in a bustling modern city in India, witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in a park and rushes to help. Soon after, she develops an intense and volatile friendship with the woman, Sara, who suffers from a variety of symptoms and ailments with no conclusive diagnosis, and her husband Rahil, who acts as her primary caretaker. As the trio endures the ebb and flow of Sara’s physical and mental health, Mira’s own emotional stability wobbles, ultimately causing each friend to evaluate Mira’s role within Sara and Rahil’s marriage.
Rheea Mukherjee writes with fluidity and lyricism,
