Tottenville Review

In the developed world we have been told that we can customize our lives, making them exactly what we’d like them to be.  But this promise is actualized by very few people, though is implicitly or explicitly promised to all.  We feel that we are somehow owed opportunities for wealth and/or fame, that it is accessible to all because we have seen so many televised success stories.  Those who strive to make choices that will improve their lives far more often than not fail to achieve what they set out for, and they wind up feeling worse about themselves than ever before.  The choices that they feel they could, or should, have made to bring them success have remained elusive, and so they feel that they’ve made the wrong decisions, when in fact it was a million-to-one shot that they would end up like the new star they’ve admired on television.  We are meant to think that choice is power, but in fact choice can provoke anxiety.

Continue reading "The Limit on Choosing: a Review of ‘The Tyranny of Choice’"…

Amina Mazid is twenty-four and lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The only daughter of an inconstantly providing father, Amina supports her family by tutoring. Still, Amina’s marriage matches are limited. Using the computers in the homes of her wealthy clients, enterprising Amina creates a profile on AsianEuro.com. Continue reading "Mail-Order Marriage 2.0"…

 In Sheet Music, Robert Gibb considers the natural world as well as the man-made one via the gaze of music—with an emphasis on classical, but also jazz—creating via language what otherwise might be drawn on score paper as musical notation. Two things strike you about Gibb and his poetry no matter what page you might flip to or how many poems you read: one, the daring-yet-consummate way he works with poetic form in his poems—never afraid to mold the form to the topic, yet never in a way that is too experimental or difficult. Second, Gibb approaches all manner of topics from trees to jazz to animals in a zoo with a steadfast sense of awe and wonder. An everyday thing—any everyday thing—are all fair game to Gibb, who seems more a journalist at heart, though one with a poet’s great gifts for detail and word-craft. Continue reading "Sheet Music: Poems"…

Spanning a hundred years, Jessica Maria Tuccelli’s debut novel, Glow, is a tale of generations and the generational legacy of American race relations. Essentially, it is the story of a mother, Amelia McGee, a woman of mixed Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and her young daughter, Ella. Amelia is a dangerously outspoken pamphleteer for the NAACP in 1941, and fearing for her daughter’s life, she puts Ella on a bus home to Georgia in the middle of the night. Continue reading "Unheard American Voices"…

This summer, BBC America will begin airing a new series called Copper. Set in the grimy downtown wards of mid-19th Century Manhattan, the series will follow an Irish immigrant police officer as he navigates the teeming streets of the Five Points, the notorious enclave which was a flashpoint during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Not so long ago, such a setting would have been an awful hard sell for a TV producer, filmmaker, or even a novelist. But from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to Lindsay Faye’s debut historical thriller The Gods of Gotham, these tumultuous decades in New York history – with their highly complex ethnic, political, and racial dynamics – have proven to be fertile narrative ground. Continue reading "Holy Terror"…

Holy crap. Adam Wilson, you are a twisted, weird mother-effer and I’d like to take you to dinner. Don’t be fooled by the spring green cover or the soft edges of this paperback, because Flatscreen is a disgusting, amazing, low-blowing sack of a narrative. It’s a relentless kick in the groin. Wilson doesn’t waste any time stinging you with a sadistic wit that conjoins familiarity and truth. Unfolding the chaos, stillness, and gunplay would be an injustice to Wilson and his crew of hopelessly crazed characters who are desperate to detach. Flatscreen is a clutter of masterfully orchestrated actions that inevitably bind the players ever more tightly to one another. Continue reading "Flatscreen"…

In Hasidism and Modern Man, Martin Buber, the great philosopher and folklorist, tells of a traditional account between a Jewish zaddik, a person of outstanding virtue and piety, and his young son. The zaddik asks his son, “With what do you pray?” And the son, perhaps in an effort to impress his righteous father, responds: “Everything of great stature shall bow before Thee.”  When the son asks the same question of his father, the zaddick dryly says, “With the floor. And with the bench.” The anecdote, especially the zaddik’s practical approach to divinity, is an apt metaphor for the fiction of Nathan Englander. His first two books, the much praised short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and his wonderful novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, both interrogate the modern varied Jewish experience for often remarkable insights into the more universal story of humanity. Englander’s latest collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank continues that work, but with a more deliberate and complicated relation to the process of storytelling itself. These are stories about how we tell our stories. Continue reading "What We Talk About When We Talk About Nathan Englander"…