John Domini
John Domini's latest book is MOVIEOLA!. In early 2019, he'll publish his fourth novel, The Color Inside a Melon.
Daša Drndić’s Belladonna
by John DominiFEB 2018 | Books
Paging through Daša Drndić’s Belladonna, you can’t miss the lists of the dead. Twice during the later going, the text interrupts itself for page after page of names, in smaller-font double-columns. Names of the murdered, to be sure: victims of the Holocaust.
Dorothy Parker with a Ph.D.
by John DominiMAY 2018 | Books
Not only does Dubravka Ugresic’s novel appear in translation; you could say it’s about translation. The latest from a busy, brainy Croatian—her 14th book, half of them fiction—Fox consists primarily of worrying at various texts, though not all of them are literary.
Elle Nash's Animals Eat Each Other
by John DominiJUNE 2018 | Books
In her debut novel, Animals Eat Each Other, Elle Nash has no interest in testing boundaries; instead, she crashes right through.
Running the Devil's Gauntlet: Ahmed Bouanani's The Hospital
by John DominiNOV 2018 | Books
Hades, Gehenna, Hell: every culture has one, a realm of punishment without end. By any name, too, it’s been inspiration without end. For creative types, the Awful Place allows awesome freedom.
Different Routes to Rarified Air
by John DominiJUNE 2017 | Books
Both these texts expand the mind, taking the reading experience to places most never risk. One, Dreamlives of Debris, gets up into rarified air indeed, cleansing the system. As for The Gift, that’s perhaps less bracing, but always tangy and whip-smart. Before I explain further, however, I’ve got to look back half a century.
Salman Rushdie's The Golden House
by John DominiOCT 2017 | Books
The most notable risk is the cutting-edge contemporaneity. The denouement of Golden House unfolds pretty much at the moment we read it, in later 2017, and its tragic climax the previous fall has a lot to do with the tragedy of the last election.
America the Dysfunctional
by John DominiFEB 2016 | Books
Few writers can match the bifurcated career—bifurcated yet brimful—of Frank Lentricchia. Starting at the end of the 1960s, as a professor at Duke, Lentricchia established himself as a literary critic of muscle and subtlety.
Natural-Born Storytellers
by John DominiJUNE 2016 | Books
If the expression “natural-born storyteller” hasn’t yet gone to the glue factory, then these two novels take the nag out for a fresh canter. Grace is a début for Natashia Deón, whose credentials include a PEN Fellowship, and while Allison Amend has three earlier books, and some prize recognition, she’s still young enough to have whipped up something new for Enchanted Islands.
Flower or Whip?
by John DominiDEC 16-JAN 17 | Books
You might call D. Foy’s Patricide a long and sorrowful aria over abuse in the home and its lingering damage; or you might call it a portrait of the scuffling white male, here in the U.S., detailing their recent tumble from King of the Mountain; or then again, it may be a scuzzball spiritual journey, Siddhartha Goes to AA, in which multiple addictions shred a young man almost to bits before he staggers to a kind of Buddhist enlightenment.
The Gut Wants What It Wants
by John DominiMAY 2015 | Books
Amelia Gray’s Gutshot bristles in the best way. Just about every prick and sting compels you to seek more, to take up the next story—gingerly—and the next. Indeed, the author’s second set of short fiction represents an advance for her in its size alone.
Given Enough Rope
by John DominiOCT 2015 | Books
Lincoln Michel has brought off a worthy debut in Upright Beasts, a rowdy klatch of stories with a number of winners. The fictions leave their most beautiful bruises about halfway through, as the author swings without a hitch from the relative realism of the section titled “North American Mammals” to the stories collected under “Familiar Creatures,” each of them a wild narrative hair.
The Containable Apocalypse
by John DominiFEB 2014 | Books
Over the past decade, in our finer quarterlies, few names have turned up more often than Jacob M. Appel. You also found him among the finalists for awards in the short story—and among the prize-winners. I myself once floundered in Appel’s wake, merely a finalist while he was the finalist.
Picking Over The Crumbs
by John DominiJUL-AUG 2014 | Books
Texas may be the southernmost point in the U.S., but it gets awfully cold. The chill pervades Larry McMurtry’s best novels, like The Last Picture Show (1966), in which the biting winds may carry away a young man’s soul. The same threat hangs over Brandon Hobson’s new slip of a novel, Deep Ellum.
MONSTROUS AMERICA
by John DominiNOV 2014 | Books
First encounter with Blake Butler’s new novel may leave you dazzled, yet also disoriented, and if so you’ll find a point of reckoning in Roberto Bolano’s 2666.
Sibum in Nighttown
by John DominiOCT 2013 | Books
The Traymore Rooms, a novel at once hugely ambitious and never above an off-color crack, aspires to be the late triumph of a long career.
Zachary Lazar's Vengeance
by John DominiFEB 2018 | Books
“I saw within myself,” admits our narrator, “a kind of ignorance that grew deeper the more I looked at it.” Sounds about right for his novel, too: the more deeply Vengeance draws us in—really, it’s hard to look away—the greater its ambiguity.
Joshua Mensch's Because, A Lyric Memoir
by John DominiJUNE 2018 | Books
Among the many shocks and felicities in Joshua Mensch’s Because, one of the best is his way with a semi-colon.
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body
by John DominiSEPT 2018 | Books
Zimbabwe's social fabric has often been in shreds, the worst toll often taken on the women: an ongoing catastrophe that provides the best background for appreciating the novels of Tsitsi Dangarembga
Touring Trump Country in a Clown Car
by John DominiMAR 2017 | Books
For a story beset with some of the ugliest traumas of fractured contemporary America, Mary Troy’s busy new novel careens along with remarkable lightheartedness.
Defacing the Palimpsest:
Don DeLillo, New York Antagonist
by John Domini
JUNE 2017 | Books
For much of his career, on many of his books, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists confined his bio to a single line: “Don DeLillo lives in New York.” That was it, and more recently, as I dug into connections between the man’s work and his native city, I often suspected I wasn’t offering much better.
The Lonely Scrivener:
GAY TALESE with John Domini
DEC 17-JAN 18 | Books
Gay Talese tells me it feels strange not to begin a Monday morning in “the Bunker.” By this he means his Manhattan workspace.
Escape from American Noise
by John DominiAPR 2016 | Books
It can look as if the poet Campbell McGrath is moving away from his strengths, in his new “Hubble Space Telescope: the Galaxies (1990).” Indeed, the piece appears in a book, XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, about which you might say the same.
Zadie Smith Offers Some New Moves
by John DominiNOV 2016 | Books
I can’t deny the spell cast by Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s latest. I can’t hold back from declaring it first a career peak, one she’ll be hard-pressed to top, and beyond that a steep challenge for any novelist out there.
Time Ages In a Hurry: Stories
by John DominiAPR 2015 | Books
Over in Italy, Time Ages In a Hurry was one of a spate of Antonio Tabucchi titles preceding his death in early 2012. He wasn’t that old, 68, but he’d long been battling cancer, and in his last year friends and family moved him from Siena, where he taught, to Lisbon, the home of his heart.
Story Towards Story
by John DominiJUL-AUG 2015 | Books
For a form defined by length, the novel depends remarkably on what it leaves out. Even a novelist who prefers to let the weeds go, a Proust or a Wallace, has to prune away a few.
New York Stories
by John DominiDEC 15-JAN 16 | Books
Here we have two new selections of stories from two New Yorkers, both on smaller presses, both by men we might still call young. More significantly, both refract their light through the same aesthetic prism—often throwing off lovely colors, I must add.
LANCE OLSEN with John Domini
MAY 2014 | Books
In Theories of Forgetting, Lance Olsen’s 12th novel and 25th book, he may have brought off the boldest departure of a career dedicated to such takeoffs. The formatting allows the text to be read in either direction, each featuring different fonts.
Continental Divine
by John DominiSEPT 2014 | Books
About halfway along, just as we’re getting the hang of Luke Goebel’s wild and voluble debut—not so much a novel as a narrative kaleidoscope, putting a few essential shapes and colors through one tumble after another—we arrive at a whole new configuration. We come to the peyote trip.
With Kings and Camp Counselors
by John DominiJUL-AUG 2013 | Books
A bristling yet alluring doohickey, ostensibly about a week away from the workaday world, Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp also signals the end for one of American publishing’s finest escapes from the ordinary.
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