Winter/Karl Ove Knausgaard, my Chicago Tribune review

I had the great pleasure of reviewing Winter, the second in a seasonal quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in the Chicago Tribune. The full review is here.

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Some Luck by Jane Smiley (in Chicago Tribune)

I was privileged to review this National Book Award long list selection for Printers Row Journal. The piece begins like this, below, and continues here.

Life is one thing and then another, one day and soon the next, ambition superseded by surprise, desire thwarted by the reality we didn't forecast. Sometimes we get out in front of life. Oftentimes, we don't.

So here's the question: Where, in all of this, is the plot? The conflict and the climax? The sure cause and the clear effect? The resounding resolution? Life is successive and iterative; it is not inherently themed or arced.

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How audaciously delicious, then, that Jane Smiley has turned her considerable talents to a trilogy called "The Last Hundred Years" — and that she means it. One hundred years, one hundred chapters, the first 34 of which can be found in Book 1, titled "Some Luck." It's the Langdon family saga, the story of an Iowa farm and the people who inhabit it, the fences that stitch, the horizons that beckon, the love that lives in plain sight and inside a child's biscuits.

"Some Luck," simply and impossibly enough, is the story of what happens next.

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reviewing Aimee Bender in the Chicago Tribune

What a pleasure to review Aimee Bender in this weekend's Chicago Tribune. The review begins like this, below, and can be read in its entirety here.

We gathered in a circle in the side room and talked about mirrors, and still water, and wells, and feeling understood, and opals, and then we did a creative-writing exercise about our first memory of the moon, and how it affected us, and the moment when we realized it followed us … and then we wrote haiku.

I borrow this gorgeous scene from the midst of the title story in Aimee Bender's new collection, "The Color Master." I place it here, as a header and a prompt, as a way of saying that this, perhaps, is where Bender's wild and fantastical stories begin — with a first memory of the moon. Perhaps Bender, as a little girl, was already paying attention to the way light dives through and past forest leaves. Perhaps she was stacking unlike things beside unlike things and forging intricate bridges. Perhaps, after her mother read her fairy tales, she hid beneath her covers with a flashlight, a pair of scissors, some crayons and glue, and rearranged the elements to make the stories more bewildering and aberrant and lovely.

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