Bones Buried in the Dirt by David Atkinson Finalist in the First Novel category of the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Bones Buried in the Dirt features a young boy named Peter. Ranging from ages four to twelve, Peter’s stories focus on the sort of moments in childhood that get buried in …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Bones Buried in the Dirt by David Atkinson”
You as Poetry by Rose Hunter “The caveat is — I don’t read much poetry these days, although when younger I read poetry avidly. I bought this new collection of Rose Hunter poems because I had read two of her earlier collections, and liked them very much; ironically, I first discovered Rose’s work in …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | You as Poetry by Rose Hunter”
Limber by Angela Pelster Angela Pelster’s startling essay collection charts the world’s history through its trees: roots in the ground, rings across wood, topiaries, wind-sculpted pines, the skinny poplars of her youth in Canada, and a desert in Niger, where “The Loneliest Tree in the World” once grew. In her backyard, a squirrel’s …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Limber by Angela Pelster”
Don Dreams and I Dream, Leah Umansky’s Mad Men Inspired chapbook both celebrates and transcends its subject, the iconic Mad Men television series. Umansky gives us a scathing dissection of American advertising, pop culture, and gender. “Don Dreams and I Dream is compulsively readable, but it is far from a light collection of poems. Most …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Don Dreams and I Dream by Leah Umansky”
The Object Parade by Dinah Lenney This new collection of interconnected essays marches to a provocative premise: what if one way to understand your life were to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell? Each …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | The Object Parade by Dinah Lenney”
In the title story of The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai (pronounced keh-die-nay), a Lithuanian mafia boss who seeks to conquer the world through black market cucumbers takes two Americans on a strange tour of his castle, a former Soviet storage house. In a similar way, author Wendell Mayo takes readers on a strange tour to the …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai by Wendell Mayo”
Sex has always come without consequences for seventeen-year-old Evan. Until he hooks up with the wrong girl and finds himself in the wrong place at very much the wrong time. After an assault that leaves Evan scarred inside and out, he and his father retreat to the family cabin in rural Minnesota—which, ironically, turns out …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Sex & Violence by Carrie Mesrobian”
The Whack-Job Girls portrays a posse of women who either don’t quite fit in or are deeply disconnected from society. Dark humor creeps through these quirky tales as one thinks she sees the Virgin Mary on her living room wall, another losing her eyesight refuses to the end to quit her rock’n’roll parade, still another …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | The Whack-Job Girls by Bonnie ZoBell”
For Someone Else’s Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Someone Else’s Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone”
Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan From Nancy Horan, New York Times bestselling author of Loving Frank, comes her much-anticipated second novel, which tells the improbable love story of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his tempestuous American wife, Fanny. At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco …
Continue reading “ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Under the Wide and Starry Sky”