reviews

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend Author: Jeffrey Eugenides During May, the famous month of the short story, I discovered that long-time favorite author Jeffrey Eugenides had published another work, Fresh Complaint. It was sitting there, gleaming with all the potential sadness and eloquent introspection on the human condition that characterizes Eugenides’ shattering prescience. It was also the library book club’s selection for that month. I pounced. Memories of Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, filling my mind, I dove in, despite the fact that I’m really more of a long fiction (i.e. novel) person. I like the completion, the sense of coming full circle, instead [...]

Small town, big story... Author:  Timothy B. Tyson He was just ten years old.  It was 1970 in Oxford, North Carolina and Tim Tyson was just an unremarkable white boy when Henry Morrow, an equally unremarkable black man, was shot and killed by a trio of remarkably violent white men.  The murder would inflame this small town and would go on to transform Mr. Tyson’s life.  He tells his remarkable story in Blood Done Sign My Name, shedding much light on why America’s original sin continues to befoul the lives of people in small towns and large cities across the [...]

Pensive perambulations... Author:  Robert Moor It was inspired by one really long hike.  Spanning 2200 miles, from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail is one of the longest hiking trails in the world.  It was while walking this trail in 2009 that a young man named Robert Moor started thinking deeply about the nature of trails.  Aptly named, On Trails is the result and it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds. Bison on the frozen trail. Searching back to the dawn of time – when Earth’s earliest animals used their newly evolved musculature to slowly squirm across [...]