A Couple Things I Think You Should Read

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But I’m not trying to push you or anything.

This review by Spencer Dew that went up today at GwI is mad to live. Possibly the greatest review of anything ever. I feel this deeply and sincerely and beg of any commenter to refute me with better examples of how something should be reviewed.

And this essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, the “sci fi” writer who’s written little besides classics in her years.

Review: Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young

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The tiny pieces collected in this volume, averaging around 35 words in length, offer up implications of broader narratives. In remarkably few letters, Young presents people and their physical and emotional locations.

There is the feel of haiku to some of these pieces – the invisible, the taken-for-granted, rendered in precise and unexpected ways. Yet more importantly there is the occurrence of epiphany to the very human characters of Easter Rabbit – bone-crushing epiphanies, as when a man realizes that the same voice sounds “not unlike his lover, his mother, a wounded horse.”

Young delineates, faintly but nonetheless viscerally, the obsessions and terrors of the unnamed “he”s and “she”s and “they”s that people this book, their acts of remembering, their plumb lines and chalk, their approach to the edges of the idea of their own mortality.

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Book Reporters

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So, by the time forty-five days have passed, we should have the following guest reviews posted (as per this earlier offer):

These reviews should hopefully set the tone and standard for future reviews on TWAK. I’m glad it’s going down smoothly. Thanks to everyone for taking part.

-phm