The Believer // The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson

Please see my review of Brian Evenson's amazing new novel in the Nov. issue of The Believer.

The Open Curtain is the product of a singular and radiant imagination, and with this novel Brian Evenson proves himself to be one of the mose provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today.

American Book Review // Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

My review of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman appears in the Nov./Dec. issue of American Book Review, which also contains a Focus on Japanese literature and culture guest-edited by my good friend K. Malcolm Richards.

Many of these twenty-five pieces have been welded together out of scrap metal left over from other, more ambitious projects. A few, like “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story” and the marvelous “New York Mining Disaster,” were among the first tales Murakami ever wrote, back in the early nineteen-eighties. Some are from a collection of short-shorts and others first appeared in Japan under a separate cover titled Five Strange Tales from Tokyo. Murakami tinkered with his story “Firefly,” bending it to fit inside his novel Norwegian Wood, and “Man-Eating Cats” will be familiar to admirers of Sputnik Sweetheart.