An intriguing but inconsistent collection that explores the allure of bookstores.
A volume of short stories and poetry aims to celebrate bookstores.
After bumping into each other at Classics Books in Trenton, New Jersey, bookstore owner and writer Maywar and prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa decided to “collaborate on a collection of poems and stories that all take place” in a bookstore. The result is a volume of 20 offerings from various authors and artists that include poetry, prose, a play, and a scattering of illustrations. Following the introduction, the collection opens with a piece by editor Maywar (Running Flat, 2016) that alludes immediately to the magical quality of bookstores: “Everybody wants to pull a book in a bookstore and discover a secret passageway.” Komunyakaa contributes an extract from his book-length poem “The Last Bohemian of Avenue A,” a mournful paean to disappearing Lower East Side bookstores. A short story by Jeff Edelstein steps inside the mind of an impatient book collector. In a tale by Jackie Reinstedler, a bookstore becomes a family’s place of refuge from worldly worries. Komunyakaa’s poem is a standout piece; his writing is spare yet fiercely moving: “Lower East Side bookstores / are now gutted temples, / & when windows of St. Marks / were papered I felt the hurt.” A poem by Barry Gross effectively portrays the homely comfort drawn from bookstores. Regarding closing time, he writes: “I’m hoping he overlooks / and locks me in so I can make / a paper blanket of words / to feed this warmth.” But the collection lacks variety, with Maywar contributing nine of the 20 pieces. His keen observations are let down by tenuous metaphors: Bookstores are “powder kegs, ready to amplify whatever emotion you have when you enter one.” They often offer sentiments expressed by other writers, making the collection repetitive: “Used bookstores are havens for readers in an unkind world.” Still, the poem “At Classics Books” by Doc Long deftly captures the atmosphere of a bookstore: “Open any book” and sense “the sulk of wine and incense / all the way from Dakar or Tashkent.” But the evocative scent of biblichor permeates this volume all too faintly, proving insufficient to transport readers to their favored spots between the bookshelves.
An intriguing but inconsistent collection that explores the allure of bookstores.Pub Date: April 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-933974-32-3
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Ragged Sky Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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