Peter Sheehy has, over the years, organized his bookcases thusly: by title, by author, by date, by publisher, by color, by bookstore, by (living) writers he’d most like to sleep with, and once with the spines facing in, but what a disaster that was.
These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen…
Equal parts history lesson and modern American comic-book epic, infused with the tragic voodoo magic of the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is, simply, sprawling. Junot Díaz presents his sophomore effort, a literary whirlwind (and this 11 years in the making following 1996’s much-heralded story collection, Drown), with grace and aplomb. The…
