Dactyl Foundation offers a $1000 award to any literary fiction author, writing in English, who has published a book-length work, novel or collection of short stories. To be considered for the 2016 award, an author must be nominated by a peer, another published literary fiction author who must submit a review of one of the author’s works to Dactyl Review by December 31, 2015. Continue reading
Category Archives: just literary fiction
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Gifted chronicler of American life, Jonathan Franzen offers a rather quiet plot in The Corrections (FSG, 568 pages), which follows the lives of the Lambert family headed by Enid and Alfred, typical Midwestern parents, whose children have scattered, eager to find their own definitions of happiness. The oldest, Gary, is a money manager, an asshole son, whose inner workings are described with surprising compassion; the middle son, Chip, is a lecherous and pretentious academic who’s just lost his position and his girlfriend and is working on an autobiographical screenplay that betrays a dreadful lack of self-awareness; the youngest, daughter Denise, is a talented chef who keeps throwing herself into undesirable relationships. Will they succeed? Is the aging patriarch going completely mad? And why is Alfred such an unhappy old man? Will Enid get all her children to come home for one last Christmas together?
Andrew’s Brain by E. L. Doctorow
The Talkative Corpse by Ann Sterzinger
Lurking in the shadows of the seedy underbelly of the American heartland are the kinds of people you’re probably scared of. The kinds of people you, perhaps, don’t think of often. The kinds of people who just scrape by, praying for lottery-ticket miracles, and Heavenly rewards, and three consecutive days of tranquility and security. People like John Jaggo. Continue reading
Dismantle The Sun by Jim Snowden
“Someone had to die for Hal Nickerson to live in the house that he and his wife Jodie bought for a song seven years ago.” So begins this dry-toned, cool, and detached novel Dismantle The Sun (Booktrope Editions, 324 pages) with a line and a sentiment that prove to be something of a mantra for its main protagonist and a lynchpin refrain for the narrative arc. In the world of nature — in the world of man — something has to die for something else to live. Some persons — the Nickersons — include this in their ample proof of the non-existence of a beneficent Creator, while others — the fundamentalists — attribute the state of the cosmos to original and ongoing sin. Both take it all very personally. Hal Nickerson’s atheism in conjunction with that of his wife informs all of his sensibility while providing a certain distance from the most basic issues of life and death, love and hatred. Continue reading
2014 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award goes to Dennis Must
We had many outstanding nominations for 2014 (and several late entries, hence the delay in announcing the award), and we are happy to congratulate Dennis Must for his fine work, Hush Now, Don’t Explain (Coffeetown Press in 2014), for which he will receive a $1000 prize.
In his review, Jack Remick called Hush Now, Don’t Explain, “a unique American novel, written in the language of the heartland before Jesus became a pawn in the political battle for the American soul. It is written in a subdued, subtle, understated lyrical style. It is as rich and diverse as America herself. It is at once a romance complete with trains, whorehouses, steel mills, and the death of the drive-in-movie theater.”
Here is Must:
These colossal land ships (trains) with spoked iron wheels taller than three of us…these were the engines of our dreams…Not like in the Pillar of Fire Tabernacle, where Christ hung on a cross and a single candle flickered under this feet…Everything inside the round house was glistening black, oil-oozing soot, except the hope curling out from under the bellies of those locomotives and their stacks, rising right up to the clerestory windows, then out to the sky and heaven. (109)
Thanks to Jack Remick for contributing the review. For more information about the Dactyl Award click here.
Lion and Leopard by Nathaniel Popkin
It may very well be that Nathaniel Popkin’s novel Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press, 345 pages) requires more than one reading in order fully to appreciate its argument. Certainly the discerning reader should have no trouble recognizing the quality of its painterly effects that so thoroughly complement the subject matter of this passionate work. Whoever seeks out literary writing for its own sake will not be disappointed. Nathaniel Popkin is a writer’s writer and possesses the prized capacity to render the essentially poetic not only in accessible but also in original phrases and images:
The Humanitarian by N Caraway
How do the powers that bring aid to displaced and starving people spread over a vast continent? The answer is in ways that don’t meet their true needs because these have long been either erased by or made irrelevant to the imperial incursions, power grabs, and internecine intrigues that go hand-in-hand with the delivery of the aid itself. The immediate merit of N. Caraway’s The Humanitarian (E-Publications, 239 pages) is that it doesn’t dwell upon the depredations that are in play and that any informed reader will bring to the book. The horrors that continue on the African continent are well known and provide for much of our daily news consumption. As of his last writing, one of the locales remains a United Nations no-go zone.
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The next time you walk into a bookstore, it’s worth remembering that unseen battles have raged over the shelf-space in front of you. Winning the prime, eye-level locations and avoiding the dustier corners requires strategy, charm, the offer of a good lunch and perhaps even hard cash.
The stores themselves, of course, want you believing that here is either what you want, or should want, and so going into London’s largest bookstore last week, I decided to be led. With time-plus-cash in hand, and my cynicism tucked away, I roamed only within a restricted locus near the main entrance. And it was here that I picked up Train Dreams, by Dennis Johnson (Granta, 128). The first thing to remark upon, is size: it’s eye-catchingly small. Continue reading
Attention Authors: 2014 Dactyl Literary Award
Dear Authors,
Every book reviewed on Dactyl Review is automatically nominated for the Dactyl Foundation Literary Award. The author or publisher just needs to contact us at info@dactyl.org to accept the nomination and enter. Please see more info about the award here. Some very nice books have been reviewed this year, but we’ve only heard from a few authors and publishers. Please let us know right away if you would like your book to be considered.
-VNA
Dactyl Review 