Focus: First Fictions — January-February 2004

First Fictions

Volume 25, Number 2
January-February 2004

Focus: First Fictions

Introduction: First Fictions

Reliable Narrators
Tom Williams reviews The Hit by Jere Hoar and The End of Free Love by Susan Steinberg

Daddy Dearest
Carol Anshaw reviews What Night Brings by Carla Trujillo

Word Made Flesh and Blood
Kass Fleisher reviews VAS by Steve Tomasula

Lost Children
Richard Deutch reviews The Australia Stories by Todd James Pierce

The Book of Lists
Amy Havel reviews The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman

Through the Looking-Glass
Stacey Gottlieb reviews One Pill Makes You Smaller by Lisa Dierbeck

Less than One
David Massengill reviews Burning Salt by Anna Mockler

Second-Order Greatness
Trey Strecker reviews The Cuban Prospect by Brian Shawver

Post-Fem Fairy Tales
Vincent Czyz reviews Black Umbrella Stories by Nicolette de Csipkay

Extremely Pale Fire
Andrew Ervin reviews The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg

This is What It Reads Like When… Uh, What?
Brian Budzynski reviews Well by Mathew McIntosh

Feature: Culture Watch

Story Wars
Sven Birkerts reviews The Middle Mind by Curtis White

Underground Economy
Mel Freilicher reviews Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser

Bronx Quixote
Audrey Petty reviews Tilting at Mills by Lis Harris

Feature: On Poets and Poetry

The Power of Relationships
Linda Wagner-Martin reviews Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson by Kirstin Hotelling Zona

Making His Own Days
Terence Diggory reviews Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara by Jow LeSeuer

Book Reviews

Five Ordinary Lives
Fred Muratori reviews Lives of Water by John Hoppenthaler, Taking Down the Angel by Jeff Friedman, A Place Made of Starlight by Peter Cooley, Casino of the Sun by Jerry Williams, and Trouble by Mary Baine Campbell

Un Grito de Tejas: Required Reading
René Saldaña Jr. reviews Gritos by Dagoberto Gilb

California Girl Tara Raines reviews Indigenous by Cris Mazza

Brand-New Battles: Logue’s Homer
Lawrence Hetrick reviews All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue

Writing Games
Michael Sanchez reviews The Case of the Persevering Maltese by Harry Mathews

Seeking the Soul’s Society
Catharine R. Stimpson reviews Affiliations edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo

Seeing the World Anew
Melissa Studdard reviews Combinations of the Universe by Albert Goldbarth and The Voice at 3:00 A.M. by Charles Simic

Skeptical Aesthetics
Jocelyn Emerson reviews Slow Air by Robin Robertson

Conversational Constraint
Pablo Peschiera reviews Bus Ride to a Blue Movie by Anne-Marie Levine

Trailing Clouds of Glory
Gabriella Ekman reviews Child-and-Rose by Gennady Aygi

Loafers in Short Pants
Ron Kaplan reviews Baseball and American Culture edited by Edward J. Rielly, The Last Good Season by Michael Shapiro, and Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould

Agnostic Dionysian
Anthony Deaton reviews A History of Color by Stanley Moss

The Imprint of Facts
Laurel Blossom reviews Otherhood by Reginald Shepherd

Leading out of the Tunnel
Cori L. Gabbard reviews The Day Before by Dick Allen

A Revisioning of an American Document
Bob Grumman reviews The Preamble by Jen Benka

Big or Beautiful
Miriam Levine reviews Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy

Voodoo Love
María Luisa García Bermejo reviews Bay of Souls by Robert Stone