May 19, 2019July 31, 2019 by U.R. Bowie

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

“Every time the flight I’m on takes off. Or if I can hear a flight take off.” – From “Come As You Are,” in Harper’s “Readings,” April, 2019. From accounts of nonsexual orgasms documented in “Orgasm Range and Variability in Humans: A Content Analysis.” Study published in The International Journal of Sexual Health, November, 2018

Flights (Riverhead Books, 403 pages) is a fascinating, while quirky, eccentric book, often factual, non-fictional, often clearly fictional. The fiction is mixed in with the fact to the point that you sometimes cannot tell which is which. The ‘I’ narrator informs us early on that she

“started writing a book. It was a story for travelers, meant to be read on the train—what I would write for myself to read.” She continues as follows: “I was able to concentrate and became for some time a sort of gargantuan ear that listened to murmurs and echoes and whispers, far-off voices that filtered through the walls. But I never became a real writer . . . . In my writing, life would turn into incomplete stories, dreamlike tales, would show up from afar in odd dislocated panoramas, or in cross sections—and so it would be almost impossible to reach any conclusions as to the whole.” Continue reading →

May 8, 2019 by U.R. Bowie

On Literary Fiction: Nabokov’s Influence on Updike

CARICATURES BY DAVID LEVINE

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation or ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen-sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

Adam Gopnik

U.R. Bowie

May 3, 2019 by VN Alexander

The Head & The Hand Press

The Head & The Hand, an independent cooperative press, opened a pop-up bookstore today in the Fishtown/East Kensington area of Philadelphia at 2644 Coral St. The community-focused bookstore will provide curated fiction and local lit and hopes to make it a permanent thing.

Nathaniel Popkin, a Dactyl Reviewer and author of Lion and Leopard , is part of The Head & The Hand press. Find out more, theheadandthehand.com

April 26, 2019January 27, 2020 by Brent Robison

Milligan and Murphy by Jim Murdoch

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of doubles, twins, doppelgangers, minds and actions mirrored (perhaps as a reaction against the profound truth that each of us is utterly unique, and therefore alone). Jim Murdoch’s short novel, Milligan and Murphy (Fandango Virtual, 180 pages), is not really one of those stories, but it toys with the trope of twins who together make a single person. The half-brothers Milligan and Murphy (both named John!) are not twins but are enough alike that their non-twinness is just a technicality. Murphy, the firstborn, may be a shade more introspective, and Milligan a trifle more action-oriented, but essentially they are one mind, and the fact that they inhabit separate bodies is primarily a storytelling device. Without it, the extensive dialogues exploring their limited reality would become claustrophobic solipsism. Such is the reason for the respectable literary history of twins, brothers/sisters, bosom buddies, even the hero/sidekick construct: it works. Continue reading →

April 19, 2019April 19, 2019 by U.R. Bowie

On Literary Fiction: Flannery O’Connor

Wise Blood

Fifty years after its publication Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is still quite the bizarre little book. “Its parts seem not to fit together. For a book about the defiance of God it is strangely sportive, at once seedy and shiny bright.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

That “strangely sportive” can be applied to nearly all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. It lends to her stories their special little gleam.

“Good Country People”

O’Connor wrote one of her most famous and memorable tales, “Good Country People,” in only four days. The story practically wrote itself. A quote from O’Connor: “I didn’t know he [the bible salesman Manley Pointer] was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable.”

O’Connor read Nikolai Gogol while she was a grad student in Iowa and admits to being influenced by him. You wonder how aware or unaware she was of the similarity between Manley Pointer, her gatherer of human dead souls, and Pavel Chichikov, wholesale buyer of dead souls in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. Both characters are traveling rogues, in the employ of Satan. Manley is Chichikov’s little brother.

U.R. Bowie

April 18, 2019January 27, 2020 by Brent Robison

Mean Bastards Making Nice by Djelloul Marbrook

Mean Bastards Making Nice (Leaky Boot Press, 168 pages) is a slim volume from small UK publisher Leaky Boot Press. It contains two novellas related by theme and setting. It’s a thoroughly New York book, but that doesn’t mean stock Big Apple accents or tired tropes from TV. It means both city streets and upstate forests are simply there: as integral as the air the characters breathe.

To gloss the surface: “Book One: The Pain of Wearing Our Faces” introduces a painter, a composer, their shared alcoholism, and a mysterious woman who is a muse for both of them, but a dangerous one. “Book Two: Grace” follows a girl on the run from country to city, her discovery of her own warrior strength on the streets, and her profound impact on a few of the city’s art-world glitterati. Continue reading →

April 16, 2019April 18, 2019 by U.R. Bowie

Florida, by Lauren Groff

For the past couple of years I’ve been reading lots of short story collections by living American writers, looking for something that sparks with creativity, not often finding much. Lauren Groff is generally accepted as one of the prime divas of the MFA world of writing. The stories in this new collection, “Florida” (Riverhead Books, 2018), have been previously published in some of the premier venues in the U.S.: The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, Granta, Tin House, among others. They have been featured as well in three different anthologies of Best American Short Stories. Does that mean they are good? Alas, owing to the stranglehold that the standard MFA racket in fiction holds on these once-august publications, I’ve learned not to get my expectations up too high. Continue reading →

April 10, 2019 by Dactyl Review

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Though I spent a not inconsequential portion of my early-twenties leisure time at Bay Street in Sag Harbor, where such reggae luminaries as Steel Pulse, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, and Lucky Dube frequently performed, I did not know that not far from the concert venue was a neighborhood that had been built by African-American families after World War II. That neighborhood, made up of Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills, and Nineveh, is geographically and existentially at the center of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (Penguin/Random House, 352 pages).

Early in the novel, the now grown-up narrator Benji recalls his fifteen-year-old self settling into Sag Harbor for the summer of 1985 and contemplates the mythical aura that surrounded some of the people who came before him:

“What I did know about DuBois was that he fell into the category of Famous Black Folk—there was a way people said certain names so that they had an emanation or halo. The respectful way my mother pronounced DuBois told me that the man had uplifted the race.”
Continue reading →

March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 by U.R. Bowie