Iron Horse Literary Review
Fall 2000 Book Reviews
On this page we provide excerpts from the book reviews published in this issue and links to purchase these works on Amazon.com. If you wish to read excerpts, commentary, and biographical notes for our Spring 2001 contributors click here.
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With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires: A Memoir Through a series of essays, some of which were published previously, Willis Barnstone reveals a Borges forever engaged in conversation and contemplation about memory, death, blindness, friendship, time, and literature. Essays might not be quite the word to use here because much of the book reads like an amiable blend of conversation and anecdote... |
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The Delinquent Virgin
Laura Kalpakian. St. Paul: Graywolf, 1999. $14.00
Laura Kalpakian’s The Delinquent Virgin is an eclectic collection of stories, a treasure trove of form and style. From short-shorts to a novella, from traditional narrative to a modified epistolary form, these nine stories show Kalpakian to be a virtuoso of the short fiction genre. The stories are peopled with diverse, richly drawn characters–from a drunken priest to a washed-up sea captain to a vindictive governess striking a bawdy blow against the bourgeoise…
Come Back, Lolly Rae
Beverly Lowry. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000. $15.95
In this newly-released edition of her first novel, Beverly Lowry explores the themes and concerns that readers have come to expect from southern fiction, but Come Back, Lolly Rae is not another hopeless, angst-filled, southern novel. This book is about hope, and Beverly Lowry not only creates sparkling images to represent the abstract commodity–a flash of sunlight from the surface of a river, a shining silver disk from a whirling baton–but she also personifies hope and names it Lolly Rae...
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Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews Henry Taylor. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000. $22.50 cloth; $14.95 paper …Light verse is no replacement for serious verse, but it keeps serious verse honest. Taylor has written some of the best, genuinely serious poems of recent years; a poem like "Taking to the Woods" convinces us, not only of its own meditation, but of the value of both a life examined and of poetry. And there is seriousness, indeed gravity, behind these clerihews: they were written, Taylor says, to distract himself from the ordeal of a cancer treatment… |
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