Review of Mark Wish’s Necessary Deeds By Jack Smith, WTP Guest Writer Necessary Deeds by Mark Wish (Regal House Publishing, January 2024; 208 pp.; $18.95; ISBN 9781646034079). Mark Wish is a prize-winning short story writer and novelist. Necessary Deeds, his fourth novel, is a high-octane thriller, a murder mystery, a suspense novel—and more. It’s also a…
Category: prose book reviews
Hard-Hitting, Hard-Boiled Fiction
Review of Jack Remick’s Man Alone By Jack Smith, WTP Guest Writer Man Alone by Jack Remick (Sidekick Press, August 2023; 120 pp.; $16.94; ISBN 9781958808153). Jack Remick is the author of numerous works of fiction. His most recent work, Man Alone, is hard-boiled fiction at its best. In a series of short scenes with clipped…
A Narrative of Lost Identity
Eye on the Indies: A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Review Editor Nadia by Christine Evans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; September 19, 2023; 246 pp.; $19.00; ISBN 9781609389093 paperback; ISBN 9781609389109 eBook). “We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are…
Reflective Grief
A Search for Meaning in Grief By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light by Maryanne O’Hara (New York: Harper One, April 20, 2021; $26.99; 351 pages; ISBN 978-0-06-302776-3). Maryanne O’Hara’s affecting memoir is both a work of life, and of art. The author tells us flatly from the outset…
Micro-fiction to Inspire Sleeplessness
Wit in Brevity By Gregory J. Wolos Insomnia 11 by Michael C. Keith (Cambridge, MA, Mad Hat Press, 2020; ~200 pages; $21.95). Each of Michael C. Keith’s pieces in his latest collection of micro–fictions, Insomnia 11, lingers like an amuse-bouche on the palate of the intellect. While some among his readers might find solace in…
Description Brings the Past to Life
“Simple Things Beautifully Described” By WTP Guest Reviewer Philip Lawton Telling Sonny: A Novel by Elizabeth Gauffreau (New York, NY: Adelaide Books, December 1, 2018; 340 pages; $22.30). In Telling Sonny: A Novel, Elizabeth Gauffreau brings her extraordinary gift of observation to the insular world of inland America in the mid-1920s. Faby Gauthier, the central character,…
The Town of Whispering Dolls
Finding Reality in Fiction By Dan Wakefield, WTP Guest Writer The Town of Whispering Dolls by Susan Neville (Tuscalossa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, March 2020; 216 pages; $17.95). Winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. We always hear that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Sometimes fiction conveys a deeper truth. That’s what happens…
A Novel as Riddle
Book Review: Sleepless Night By Lisa Zeiger, WTP Guest Writer SLEEPLESS NIGHT By Margriet de Moor, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (New Vessel Press, 2019, $15.95, ISBN 9781939931696). Margriet de Moor’s novel, Sleepless Night, has triggered my relapse. When I say I used to read novels, I mean it in the way Proust…
DAD'S MAYBE BOOK by Tim O'Brien
On Fatherhood, and Lessons for Sons By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O’Brien (Houghton Mifflin, 2019. 382 pages, $28.00 hard cover, ISBN 978-0-618-03970-8.) Tim O’Brien is back in top form. His last novel, July, July, appeared when the author was fifty-nine. This new book, a nonfiction hybrid, is part journal about…
STRIKE THE EMPTY by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart’s new book on memoir extends her ongoing conversation By Richard Gilbert, WTP Contributing Editor STRIKE THE EMPTY: NOTES FOR READERS, WRITERS, AND TEACHERS OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart (Juncture Workshops, 2019). 185 pp, $12.00. Let’s start with the title, a very good place to start—bemused, as you are, by what “The Empty” is…
SILENCE by Jane Brox
Through Penitentiaries and Monasteries, A Meditation on Silence By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor SILENCE: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ONE OF THE LEAST UNDERSTOOD ELEMENTS OF OUR LIVES by Jane Brox (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2019). 310pp, $27.00 hard cover, ISBN 9780544702486. Jane Brox, like the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, worries that we lose our best selves to the…
THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD by Jennifer Acker
Transcending Cultures and the Limits of Family By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD by Jennifer Acker (Delphinium Books, April 2019). 300 pp, $25.95. Jennifer Acker’s deeply considered and expansive novel focuses on love and family transcending races, cultures, religions, geography, and time, and calls to mind other recent cross-cultural novels (such…