by Robert Taylor The Devil’s Pulpit is a collection of sermons delivered by reverend Robert Taylor outlining the parallels between the Bible and the Zodiac, with the suggestion that Christianity is only thinly-disguised paganism, and that worshipping God and Jesus is effectively worshipping the sun. Written and read in the mid-19th century, it was because…
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by Charlotte Gray I’m really having trouble with this one. I mean, it’s not even that it’s difficult for me to express my feelings toward it––it’s really good––but it’s just that I’m having a hard time talking about it, bringing any useful commentary into the review. Usually, with any of my reviews destined for The…
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by Sherman Alexie The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a story about Junior, a young Native American living on the Spokane Indian reservation. Learning at a young age how limiting life on the rez is, how the dreams of everyone around him are systematically crushed, he transfers to high school in Rearden,…
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by Andy Weir Well, here we are again. Usually I dislike trying to review a book that I don’t particularly care for, but this is an exception. Had it been hard to really hit on what my problem with The Martian was, I’d probably make vague points until something started to make at least a…
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by Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass is another poetry collection for which, like Ezra Pound’s Cathay, I can easily appreciate its importance to the history of Western literature. Wanting to create modern poetry for the New World, Whitman eschewed antique forms and themes, minimizing focus on structured rhymes, instead expressing more of the mundane and…
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by Sergei Lebedev I don’t think I can stress enough the importance of actually getting to the heart of your story in your synopsis. If that little summary on the back of your book sets people up for the wrong expectations, it can really affect the amount of enjoyment readers glean from your story. The…
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by Charles Bukowski At the time of writing this, I just finished getting through a stack of poetry in preparation for an author panel event I was tasked at moderating, and, aside from perhaps Ezra Pound’s Cathay, this was likely my favourite collection. The trouble is I’m having some difficulty getting at the why of…
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by Ezra Pound Cathay is a collection of old poems––mainly Chinese works from the 8th century––translated by Pound, but it’s a bit more complicated and interesting than that. Pound, who at that time knew little to no Chinese, worked from the notes of the Harvard educated scholar, Ernest Fenollosa, a transcript of which is included…
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by James Alan Gardner I didn’t actually know who James Gardner was until attending the 2015 Ad Astra science fiction and fantasy writers’ convention, where I had the pleasure of sitting in on several author panels in which he participated. Despite the clear knowledge he displayed within the intelligent discussions I witnessed, nothing really made…
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by John Pringle Though it’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of reading one of Pringle’s short story collections, Spirals starts in a very familiar way, with his story, A Good Boy. Not only was this the only one in the collection that I’d read previously, it’s also a contest-winning story––the 2014 Northwestern…
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