Tag: Book Review

  • Personal Review: “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson

    Up until a couple of months ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Denis Johnson. (And yes, the rock I live under is very comfortable.) I found out about him from a review of Ted Geltner’s biography of Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures. From that article, I was intrigued and put Johnson’s Jesus’ Son on my reading list.

    If I had pushed myself, I could have read the book in a day, but spreading it out over three seemed more appropriate. A couple of things jumped out at me, besides the fact that it was a quick read. First, this book of short stories just oozed 90’s literature, which is strange as most of the stories take place in the 70’s, while the stories themselves were written in the 80’s, and only published in 1992. I can’t fully say why it felt so 90’s, but it Gen-X despondent seemed to be lurking in corners. The second idea the book presented to me is that the drunk/addict poet or writer is rather cliché now. Maybe not as drunken muscled as Hemmingway, Kerouac, or Burkowski, but the stories in the volume ran in the same vein. Here, we are presented with pretty much the same first-person character from story to story, who is too poetic to be a regular run of the mill drunk. No, this is the tragic drunk writer whose writing is their only salvation – the thing that keeps them going.

    That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. No, I was struck at how simple, and effortless everything in the stories felt. It carried such weight but drifted on the air. The destruction of a character’s life never felt so beautiful and fragile. No, I get why Jesus’ Son is placed on best of short story collection lists, year after year. Johnson’s stories and writing style has clearly been influential. I was about half way through “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when it dawned on me how many flash writers must consider Denis Johnson a primary source, with his books lovingly squirreled away on their shelves.

    The final thought that I had while reading this book was that these stories felt like they were fun to write. Some books can feel laborious – not to read that is – such as writing it took time, work, dedication, perseverance to deliver the story exactly the way the writer wanted to tell it. Jesus’ Son felt like it was a blast to write. Either making it all up, or using real life situations, or maybe combining it all together, the end result was a book that felt like it was just as entertaining to write as it was to read.

    Having said all of this, I must now return to my home under the rock. There, I will toss this book up on the shelf, with all the other collections of short stories that I own and wonder how did I miss out on Denis Johnson when he was alive?

  • Flash Fiction Review – “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney

    (The flash fiction story “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney was published on March 19th, 2026 at Milk Candy Review.)

    “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney is the type of flash piece that makes me love flash writers as they can be inventive and playful with this form, while at the same time making me ask, in a mischievous way, “What did I just read?”

    In “Two days after I dies” Justine Sweeny gives to us the character of a recently realized ghost. I love that this spirit is frantic and unhinged – tethered to this world, either unable or unwilling to leave it. Sweeny uses effectively simple techniques here; lack of capitalization, run-on sentences, and short words that make a choppy, staccato rhythm to the piece. What the writer creates is a spirit’s frenzied attempt to get all of these words out and tell us this self-perceived vitally important story. There is an anger to this ghost. A viciousness in her as she is annoyed that someone she doesn’t know well would dare post a personal reflection of her passing on social media. There is a hint at humor in the beginning, but as the fury builds, the tone begins to switch to an unhealthy bitterness which is out of proportion to the allegedly aggrieved crime. Take how the ghost lists all the offenses of this woman. Though the ghost sees the offenses as unforgivable transgressions, we start to feel a sense of jealousness in the comparison of their motherly actions. And when the twist arrives at the end, it lands with pity, and a disbelief that one, even in the afterlife, is so wrapped and warped in grievance, lacking the empathy to acknowledge that there is one person they cared about suffering in their mourning. But most haunting is how this ghost seems to lack even the slightest hint of remorse or regret that she is no longer with her children.

    Sweeney’s “Two days after I died” is a very short and compacted work, but it left me with wonderful questions to roll over in my head. Was the woman who posted on social media really affected to the degree that she claimed, or was it as the ghost suspected, a bit of online grief porn? Can one’s anger and bitterness make a person completely blind to their loved ones suffering? Can animosity and hostility follow us into the next world? Clearly, the theme was meant to apply to us in the here and now, but “Two days after I died” is a succinct rumination of the metaphysical possibility that a life lived unwell, will leave you emotionally untethered in spitefulness.

  • Short Story Review: “Stories” by Annie Ernaux

    (The short story “Stories” by Annie Ernaux, which was translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, appeared in the June 8th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Jet Swan for The New Yorker

    You know what I like most about Annie Ernaux’s “Stories”? Well, besides the language, and tone, and ethereal feeling of the loss of a past childhood, or how it feels innocent and menacing at the same time, or the power of words and storytelling, or how the protagonist/narrator doesn’t seem to be a very nice person because she sort of traumatizes a five-year-old. No, my appreciation for this story began to form when I finished reading it, as I was left wondering how fictional was this piece? I know full well that the overwhelming majority of Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, but I was still left wondering, to what degree is this fictional, or factual? For the sake of writing this, I’m going to come down on the side of fiction, as it is in the “Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, but I feel that for this story to work on all levels, Ernaux needs us the believe that this really happened. And not a portion of it; all of it. Even though I am sure this story is based on an event which has been fictionalized.

    See, it’s that last paragraph which might well be the best, and correctly used version of the “Dead chick in the basket” trick. (To explain, “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. This device was effectively used in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” where the name of the device comes from.) We go through this whole story, and then are given this last paragraph which seems to explain that this is all real. Or is it? She is a character in her own story? She wrote this to understand herself, but ended up writing another story? (You know, this just might be an unreliable narrator.)

    I will die on this hill of a fictional interpretation, because wasn’t Ernaux trying to tell us in this story that she discovered she had the ability to create a fiction so powerful that the audience accepted it as reality and had an honest emotional reaction to it? It’s like it’s meta on meta on meta. And we will never figure out what the truth is because only Ernaux knows that.

  • Short Story Review: “Rate Your Happiness” by Catherine Lacey

    (The short story “Rate Your Happiness” by Catherine Lacey appeared in the April 13th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Tobias Nicolai

    When I finished reading Catherine Lacey’s “Rate Your Happiness” I was reminded of driving a car with a manual transmission. Especially when you don’t put the car in gear and still step on the gas which causes the engine to rev really high, but you don’t go anywhere. In this story, the narrator calls this “meaningless motion” and they’re right. And it’s also very frustrating.

    I understand that the theme of this story was existing in atrophy, and motion that leads to nowhere. Unfortunately, having a protagonist that doesn’t make a decision or choice leaves the ending of the story empty and unsatisfying. There is one sentence in the last paragraph which I think attempts to bring about a conclusion: “Louise returned to the street with real intent, finally carrying her contradictory desires with total clarity…” but I have to say that this sentence is being asking to do a whole lot of heavy lifting for this story. It implies that Louise has made a choice to accept who she is when it comes to how she has reacted to the situations the story has presented. Yet, is it truly a choice when the character is only acknowledging that they don’t make choices? Though an interesting philosophical question, it doesn’t work narratively.

    What “Rate Your Happiness” presents is something that feels akin to the first one or two chapters of a novel. There are a lot of moving parts here, and Lacy does a good job of balancing them in the narrative. No one idea, theme, or character dominates, and it all flows and ripples over each other creating the feeling of a very real and complicated character in the protagonist of Louise. In fact, I enjoyed all the characters that were presented in this story, and wanted to see and hear more from them.

    Like I said, if this was the first chapter of a novel, I’m hooked and I want to see how this plays out. As a short story, the engine is revving up, but we didn’t go anywhere.

  • Short Story Review: “Enough for Now” by Cassandra Neyenesch

    (The short story “Enough for Now” by Cassandra Neyenesch appeared in the April 6th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Cecilia Carlstedt

    And then I read a short story that’s just a good, solid short story. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the first paragraph, but Cassandra Neyenesch’s “Enough for Now” is a deft piece of fiction. It’s concise in the specific story it is telling, and it never wanders into heavy handedness. Yet it is apparent that the impact of these events will live with the protagonist; perhaps not paramount in her thoughts every day, but influencing decisions though she may forget where that influence originated.

    I will be honest and admit to my bias here; I have never been a fan of stories about people in their early twenties backpacking through foreign countries. Most of these works have the stench of elitism and privilege on them, which renders the inevitable “coming of age” plot toothless in dramatic impact. Also, to steal from another work of literature, this genre of story tries very hard to convince us that these characters are travelers, when they are in fact tourists.

    I bring this up because “Enough for Now” does stick a toe into the clichés of “backpacking” stories. The protagonist, Martha, meets a fellow traveler on a train, a Dutch guy named Joost. Soon they decide to split a room together, and not long after that, they agree to travel together, as they are heading in the same direction, which leads them to start a sexual relationship together. None of this I didn’t see coming.

    What Neyenesch does in “Enough for Now” to keep the story engaging is to conjure up some very smart writing. The setting, post Tiananmen Square Massacre China, work beautifully with the stories themes; honesty, what we say in public as compared to private, trauma… Martha is a fascinating character, she is young enough to be optimistic, but also has lived enough to understand inevitable outcomes. Also, she is a woman traveling alone in a foreign country, and there is a constant, and underlining feeling of threat in this story, wherein Martha’s guard needs to be up. And it was a pleasure to read how Neyenesch takes all of these threads and themes to dash each cliché.

    This is a story about a traveler, a little jaded, but still out to explore. She might return home, and she might not. Martha is experiencing and learning as she goes. This isn’t a character who is coming of age, but learning that she an adult who is more than the sum of her experiences, and some experiences have more weight than others.