Tottenville Review

It was a confusing decade.  U.S. forces swept across the Iraqi desert in perfect formation, then found themselves saddled by the prosecution of a war whose rationale was as garbled as a really bad game of Telephone; young Americans operated military hardware demanding pinpoint precision, then got lost in civilian life; a president made a speech on TV about freedoms and sacrifice and “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies,” then enterprises inside our borders went belly up, lie after lie bubbling to the surface.  A particularly notorious offender was Texas-based; its CEO a major contributor to the president’s domestic agenda; the toxic accounts where they buried their debt named after Stars Wars characters.  Online, anyone can view footage of the former president delivering his ’01 State of the Union Address.  His voice tightens when he delivers the line: “The course of this conflict is not known… and yet its outcome is certain.” That old Harrison-Ford-is-pissed-off register, silver screen braggadocio.

Continue reading "Days of Uncertainty: Fiction from the G.W.O.T."…

Saying “This is a really nice moment” is a can’t-miss way to kill a moment, and directly addressing the philosophical questions at the heart of a story is a can’t-miss way to kill both the questions and the story. This, at any rate, is what is taught in creative writing classes, so we should be grateful that Bennett Sims, an Iowa graduate, must not have paid very close attention in workshop. Sims’ spectacular debut novel, A Questionable Shape, is ostensibly about zombies, but he is much less interested in chase scenes and infection countdowns than in using undeath to explore memory, home, family, love, and the question that unites much contemporary philosophy with the entire history of fiction: what makes a person a person rather than a zombie?

Continue reading "How Should a Zombie Be?"…

In an age where the isolating effects of social media are continuously analyzed, the short story collection Hi, This is Conchita by Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo offers an encompassing view of the ways we become detached from intimacy and the painful, misguided ways in which we attempt to retrieve it. The book is composed of four thematically dark but sentimental stories that read like soft requiems for human connection. The collection also highlights Roncagliolo’s literary virtuosity, as he moves from an opening story told entirely through dialogue to more traditional forms of narrative that become increasingly brief and concentrated.

Continue reading "Laughter’s Dark Underside: Santiago Roncagliolo’s ‘Hi, This is Conchita’"…

Jittery paranoid dystopian Fiona Maazel is back with a new novel, Woke Up Lonely, following her funny, eccentric debut  Last Last Chance. Maazel writes spectacular and very weird sentences, and in this book she tackles modern social alienation. Continue reading "Our Lady of Jittery Paranoid Dystopia"…

In Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s debut collection, Steam Laundry, poems rely wholly on the energy of a true historical narrative and the small details that elucidate the experiences of a singular life. The life belonged to Sarah Ellen Gibson – an Alaskan pioneer who follows her husband, Joe, to pursue Yukon gold claims, and later independently starts a roadhouse and laundry in Fairbanks. This research-backed “novel in poems” accumulates in the form of persona poems voiced primarily by Sarah, augmented by photographs, receipts, and correspondence from the University of Alaska Fairbanks archives.

Continue reading "Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s ‘Steam Laundry’"…

For the past twenty years, Rick Bass has proved that a writer’s loyalty to landscape will provide all the material one needs for a lifetime of work. Bass’ home in Montana’s troubled Yakk Valley—one of the last unbroken wildlife highways leading into Canada—has benefited from both his fictionalized dreaming and non-fiction advocacy. He’s as much an environmental activist and naturalist as he is a devoted writer of short stories, with full-bore activism playing a larger role in his writing in recent years. And, as a writer of direct political engagement, he makes a qualified candidate to travel beyond the Yakk and report on another deeply troubled region, Rwanda. Continue reading "The Elephant in the Room: Rick Bass’ ‘In My Home There Is No More Sorrow’"…

The timely reprint of Ödön von Horváth’s novel Youth Without God reconfigures the debates around religion that we are inundated with today in the news, in books and most pertinently, in the classroom. Rather than get lost in the now trite, overly simplified dichotomies of religion versus science, cold atheism versus blind fanaticism or us versus them, Horváth brings us back to a period when the public question of Christianity was a fundamentally existentialist one and when humanism could provide a centering answer that aimed to unite rather than divide.

Continue reading "Sermon On the Western Front"…

In Stuart Nadler’s excellent short story “Visiting,” a father drives his mostly estranged son to see his own completely estranged (and abusive) father, then waits petrified in the car while the boy goes inside and talks to the old man. The moment is great tragicomedy and gets at an important truth: often, we can neither break free from nor reconcile with our parents, so we wind up sitting ridiculously in the car, not going anywhere or doing anything. Continue reading "Sins of the Father"…

Representation of the American West in popular culture has often been identified by a certain economy of means. John Wayne’s taciturn masculinity is echoed by the wordless romance between two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain; Doris Day’s Calamity Jane speaks in monosyllables and has trouble articulating her feelings, even in Hollywood song. Feelings, in general, are secret, implied, under the surface, displaced onto the natural beauty of the country itself or at least onto the physical bodies of characters, towns, counties. Names, in general, are overdetermined, suggestive, romantic: Death Valley, Kodachrome Basin, Recapture Reservoir. The latter place lends its name to a new collection of stories by Four Corners area writer Erica Olsen. These stories of the West are full of silence, of pauses to allow the physical presence of the countryside to speak the unspoken. Often in this case, that unspoken meaning displays an acute and incisive awareness of the very tradition of its existence, and a playful willingness to reshape its traditional uses. Characters themselves either consciously or unconsciously romanticize silence or vastness. They understand it, or wonder why they do not. “The Curation of Silence,” one of the collection’s most memorable pieces,  reads like a pithy summation of the entire aesthetic mechanism of the genre, and the story itself turns out to describe the practice literally: the collection of historical silences in old jars, scraping them carefully off potsherds, preserving them in Tupperware with labels. Moab, Utah, 1782. Crested Butte, 1851. Places, names, the spaces between them.

Continue reading "Calamity and Space in Erica Olsen’s Debut Story Collection"…

The poems in Rebecca Morgan Frank’s debut collection Little Murders Everywhere bring to mind the former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s assertion that all poetry is meant to be read out loud, to be savored on the tongue. The words spill forth in a tumble of image, idea and sound, offering multi-layered pleasures. Even as we recoil from the gruesome reality of animal dissection or the grotesque self-mutilation in a carnival act, we cannot help but delight in the irregular music of layered sound. And if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot help but press our noses close to the glass of the spectacles depicted in clear-eyed terms. Continue reading "Curious Curios"…