jenknox's Reviews (494)

Really loved some of these stories. The blind date with a war lord and the awkward conversation that followed the professional introduction was particularly funny. Silly, fun book.

A masterfully written story about how we define and are defined, how we connect and need to connect, how we need to feel we mean something, and how we will do just about anything to add definition to our sense of self.

In Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, Stephanie Dickinson offers something as powerful as potent and convincing as the best narrative nonfiction in a dynamic fictional Q&A format. The structure is smart and the writing is flawless, but what is really remarkable here is the level of care in which Seberg's voice is delivered. I was enchanted by this voice, impressed by the drive, engrossed with the all-too-familiar emotional confusion and depth. This book is brilliant, slender, and easy to consume in an hour or two - even for a slow reader like me. Just don't start reading it before you have to go to work because you will likely lose track of time and show up late.

I love the ease in which Tyler tells a tale. Her characters are people I feel I know, and I find them delightful, and I want things to work out for them. I would follow them anywhere.

Sara Lippmann's writing is precise and potent. Each story grabs, pulls, and provides and up-close, unabashed glimpse of a character's life. The rhythmic language is to be commended, as are smart portrayals of characters who live fully and question later. A smart, rhythmic, resonant book.

There's something about Tina Barry's writing that equips a reader to view the ordinary with a poetic lens. In brief prose and poems, through Barry's narrators' insights and candor, we find sharp humor and innocent knowing. Mall Flower dissects the human experience one everyday scene at a time, shedding light on the American experience as it feeds off the fast-food restaurants and cigarettes, the cartoons and the pop culture icons, the corner stores and linoleum led mall corridors.

With a sort of precision and attention most poets would reserve for the mapping of a butterfly wing, Barry dedicates both her short fictions and poems to something equally perplexing and full of beautiful angles and confusing symbols - she points the magnifying glass so that it reflects the sun against the sheen of plastic, the semi-precious, the hair-sprayed, fast-food fed realities that usher many of us into and out of days, years, and even decades of longing for genuine connections.