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Posts tagged review
New review at Literary Kicks
0889 days
Mikael Covey reviews The Suburban Swindle for Lit Kicks:
“These are power words that Jackie Corley writes. Come screaming atcha from inside your head, a white hot poker stuck in your mind’s eye. Emotion raw and real, honest as it gets. … Words as emotions transcending literal meaning to an inner storm of feeling. Where it hurts, or where there is love, lust, desire, longing. A bursting forth of the moment, the augenblink. All of that, being young and feeling old. Feeling all of it slip sliding away like quicksand, and drowning in our own unfulfilled needs.”
HTMLGIANT on World Takes
0940 days
HTMLGIANT’s pr reviews World Takes by Timmy Waldron (May 2009, Word Riot Press):
“Here is a collection perfectly shaped, with a strong, punch of a first story, “Amanda”, that perfectly sets the dark, funny tone for the book. …
“Throughout the collection, Waldron’s characters exhibit a simmering wrongness and inevitable falling apart. Whereas Cormac McCarthy’s work always portrays an aspect of chaos theory, Waldron’s stories better exemplify the theory of entropy. …
“World Takes represents how independent presses can do more than publish books that are too experimental (although many of these stories are formally interesting, for sure) for the major publishers, but also can publish books that make you think, “why doesn’t this guy have a major publisher?” (Elizabeth Ellen does that to me.) And the answer to that would be that they can’t publish every good thing out there, can they? That all presses are run by humans, and many a press will pass up, wrongly, a very good book. I have no idea whether or not Waldron tried to get a major publisher in the first place, but that is’t totally my point. What I mean to emphasize here is how Indie Presses can be of a different benefit to the readers of the world: they can publish the surplus of excellent manuscripts, that for whatever non-reason, are not getting published by Random House.”
New reviews
01008 days
Hipster Book Club on Nick Antosca’s Midnight Picnic:
“This might be the scariest thing about the book, the essential thing that all scary books need: the conviction that, for as long as you are reading the story, the world is inescapably dark, and all one’s experiences that would say otherwise are simply tricks or misunderstandings. The feeling of relief on putting the book down after its satisfying ending—of seeing that it’s light out and your loved ones are alive—is followed by a nagging feeling that one has missed something. There might be dead people right in front of the reader’s face, in a space stained by trauma.”
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P.H. Madore reviews The Suburban Swindle:
“These are stories which even Bruce Springsteen wouldn’t want to tell. Mostly gritty and realist: the kind of stories I love. Corley flexes some real descriptive power… Yes, The Suburban Swindle is full of the stories of street punks and noir beauties–probably the stuff of real New Jersey, not the New Jersey I’ve seen on television. I don’t know. I just know that I liked the way she painted her youthful characters and did this without apology.”
One of the first times P.H. Madore emailed me was to say that some of Word Riot’s design was lame and that I should take down the animated GIF ads I had up. That got my attention. I don’t get insulting emails very often or if I do they’re just lame and emotional and don’t have a point. I thought P.H. had balls to say that, and he was right. I took down the crappy ads.
I was nervous when I saw on Goodreads that Madore was reading The Suburban Swindle. I knew if he thought it sucked he wouldn’t have qualms about saying so. I’m glad he liked the collection.
Review at <HTMLGIANT>
01056 days
<HTMLGIANT>‘s pr reviewed The Suburban Swindle on Friday:
“And here is the key to the brilliance of this collection; there is God in these people, even if it’s hidden deep and swathed in pain and ugliness and carelessness. These are stories that don’t shy away from anything: the realities of class, the pain of love and the simmering violence in all of us. Corley’s evenness of tone truly astonishes. She shows a impressive, sustained effort and does justice to words and humans. And regardless of squalor and suffering, Corley insists that our lives have meaning, have true and astonishing beauty, and our time on earth, even in New Jersey, is profoundly precious. This is soulful stuff. Read it.”
Write-up in The Reading Experience
01202 days
Daniel Green wrote a pretty lengthy post on The Suburban Swindle:
“One might say that the ‘radical exclusion’ manifest in these stories goes beyond the implicit narrowing of focus to be found in all short stories and extends to the exclusion of any extraneous plot devices and gestures at character ‘depth’ that inhibit immediacy of expression. Of course, one could also suggest that the sparseness in plot and character only reinforces the essential realism of the stories, since the kinds of lives they portray are themselves likely to be rather short on ‘plot’ and psychologically afflicted in generally similar ways. But whether form most often influences content or content determines form, the result in this collection is a kind of fiction in which the form of expression doesn’t merely point us to its subject but is dynamically a part of it in a way that I, for one, find impressive…
“I wouldn’t say that The Suburban Swindle is a flawless book–sometimes the familiarity of the material does subsume the liveliness of the writing–but it introduces a writer whose approach both to her subject and to the literary presentation it requires certainly makes me curious about what her future work might be like.”
Review at bookmunch
01209 days
Katherine Woodfine reviewed The Suburban Swindle for bookmunch. Here are some highlights:
‘…there is no doubt that ultimately the most powerful voices are those of the (often anonymous) female narrators – young women who may see themselves as just “some guy’s girlfriend” yet who are nevertheless sharp-eyed, unflinching observers. Though they share the tangible sense of uncertainty and confusion which runs through these stories, their narrative voices are able to offer us flashing instances of clear-sightedness, perhaps best seen in “Persons of Bondage” in which the narrator has a sudden sense of “the scene curved fresh in front of eyes that were holy and were mine.”
‘It is in these thoughtfully judged moments that Corley offers us, finally, the hints of hope and redemption that give these stories their kick.
‘Any Cop?: Whilst it may be raw in places, The Suburban Swindle fizzes over with an irrepressible energy and possibility, hinting at promising things to come.’
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Also, Steve Himmer wrote this on his blog the other day:
‘It’s the voice of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective, standing around on a stakeout and waiting for something to happen. Corley’s characters are often caught waiting for stagnant lives to change, as dependent upon that change being external as detectives are. They’re like detectives staking themselves out and finding nothing to watch, no more able to change their own lives than The Continental Op can make a suspect appear at the moment he most wants one to.’
Mind Games review at New Pages
01227 days
Laura Di Giovine reviewed David Gianatasio’s short story collection, Mind Games, for New Pages:
“David Gianatasio’s Mind Games messes with your head, but in the best way possible. A follow-up to 2006’s Swift Kicks, this brief collection of stories grabs you by the jugular. A mutiny of fervent voices bursts from the page, and each story is clever, bold, and off-the-charts surreal.
…
“Hilarious, irreverent, anxious, and at times unexpectedly poignant, Mind Games is full of compelling characters and outrageous contradictions. It also has something for everyone – sexed-up infomercials, sci-fi plot lines, stalker romance, and indecipherable riddles. Fans of witty experimental fiction will eagerly await Gianatasio’s next installment.”
Review at JMWW
01230 days
Catherine Harrison reviewed The Suburban Swindle for the Fall 2008 issue of JMWW:
“There are some books written by and about 20-somethings that fill you with nostalgia (or anticipation), a longing for new adulthood, a time full of potential and beginnings and pure independence. But Jackie Corley’s The Suburban Swindle isn’t one of those books. This short story collection is full of what the narrator in ‘Blood in Jersey’ calls ‘oiled sadness,’ meant to be read as you smoke a carton of cigarettes and a guzzle a bottle of booze. …
“Corley’s writing is concise yet provocative. She crafts her characters and images with precision and delicacy. Her writing is insightful and ultimately empathetic. Beneath these damaged people are souls craving redemption and grace, and occasionally they find them, if only through distorted memories.”
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