Braddock Avenue Books

Men Writing Women: Why I’m Good at It. Am I Good at It? How to Be Better at It.

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–By Michael Gerhard Martin

 

 

When I was an undergraduate writer-boy, I thought myself a Hemingway scholar. I carried a valise, and tried to take up pipe smoking and hunting and tweed. I drank hard and thought existentially, and wished piously for wormwood visions.

The well-thumbed copy of Papa’s Complete Stories in my valise was the Finca Viggia edition, after all, and while I still don’t know what Finca Vigia is, I knew at the time that it meant authenticity. The book’s broken spine and worn pages affirmed my own authenticity. I was going to be a writer. I was a writer. Look, world, at my valise, my fountain pen, my Finca Viggia edition, and comprehend!

Those among us not embarrassed by our twenty-year-old selves are likely slaves to ridiculous nostalgia. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Sorrow, by Catherine Gammon

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Sorrow cover


Braddock Avenue Books
304 pages, $16


Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Catherine Gammon’s Sorrow is an unapologetically dark book. In this case, you can almost judge the book by its cover, which shows slants of waning sunlight, a silhouette, and a fraction of a bed surrounded by darker and darker darkness. This is not a book for the faint of heart.

In her acknowledgments, Gammon reveals that she has structured her epilogue as Dostoevsky structured the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, and the flavor Sorrow conjures is the flavor I remember from a long-ago unit on existential literature in AP English my senior year of high school. Gammon nails the sense of epic despair to the point of despondency. Continue reading →

Last Call in the City of Bridges by Salvatore Pane (A Review by David S. Atkinson)

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Braddock Avenue Books

$16

 

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue that this is not an age of disconnection. More and more of our interpersonal communications take place electronically. Even our news sources are becoming increasingly specialized, one news source for Republicans and another for Democrats, with the result that we don’t really connect even when we need to. As in past eras, we can turn to art and literature to try to come to terms with our changes world and how a person might survive within it.

However, necessary though this view into modern disconnection is, there is a problem with exploring this in fiction. After all, the issue is disconnection. How can an author depicting disconnection do so in any meaningful way while still connecting the reader to the story? If the story fails to connect with readers, then readers will not be engaged and the story goes unread. We are talking about disconnect, after all. Last Call in the City of Bridges is definitely a book that has to come to terms with this particularly thorny issue.

Michael Bishop, the main character of Salvatore Pane’s Last Call in the City of Bridges, opens his story on what is a night of hope for him, election night 2004:

It was supposed to be the greatest night of our lives. By our, I mean my entire generation, all those unlucky souls raised on the 8-bit wastelands manufactured by Nintendo, all those boys and girls who watched the Berlin Wall crumble in kindergarten, the Twin Towers in high school. Overeducated, Twittering, viral…Election Night was supposed to be our moment, but not all of us were ready to believe. Continue reading →