Criticism: Fiction by Contemporaries

Last month, I pulled together a list of 10 Goodreads reviews of poetry books, all by writers whom I knew in some fashion or another. This month, I'm doing the same for fiction. Admittedly, this list is shorter, with only nine instead of ten authors below, so while I considered including people I've met in passing -- Wallace Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg, Kwame Dawes, I decided to stick with those who if told my name, would at least be able to acknowledge my existence as real and then some. My apologies to Kevin Sampsell, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Amina Akhtar who I've yet to review on Goodreads. (New post ahead!) I also discovered in the process of compiling this list that I've read enough non-fiction books by people I know to justify a whole other post. You can look forward to that one, too.

1. Gerard Cabrera's Homo Novus: "A young Puerto Rican boy comes under the influence of a predatory priest with more than a smidgen of self-awareness."

2. Thaddeus Rutkowski's Safe Colors: "Honesty and self-deprecation inform this novel no matter the narrator's age or his intent." (Also true of Rutkowski's Haywire.)

3. Jarrod Campbell's The Reason I'm Here: "Can you mix the hard-boiled with high-art? Of course you can... Campbell has his own spin on the classic combination."

4. Mare Davis' Alice and Fay: A Fairy Adventure: "A lizard and a fairy... brave up to rescue the tadpoles in a shrinking pool."

5. Julia Glass' Three Junes: : "My favorite section ... is the initial, embedded novella which concerns the marriage of a well-to-do newspaper editor and a dog trainer."

6. Jeanne Thornton' Summer Fun: "This novel has an ingenious structure... letters written by an obsessed fan to the leader of her favorite band (modeled after The Beach Boys)."

7. Staszek's Three-Hand Jax and Other Spells: "Staszek's search for the perfect mind and the perfect ass in one man is heartfelt and heartbreaking."

8. Edward Medina's Stories New York: "...peopled by a narcissistic vampire killer, a justice-seeking werecat, and a sadly cursed if resourceful vintner."

9. Monica Drake's The Folly of Loving Life: "Linked stories examine an array of characters at their most vulnerable and human." (Also check out Clown Girl and The Stud Book.)