reading notes

by Steven Sherrill
ISBN: 0312308922
The labyrinth thousands of years in his mythical past, the Minotaur is now known as M and works as a cook. Everyone arounds him realizes that he is half-bull, and he encounters everything from quiet acceptance to fear-based harassment because of who he is.
I like stories where the outrageous, magical, or mythical [...]

by Jim Munroe
ISBN: 0380810433
As you might guess from the title, this is a fun book. It is the second of Munroe’s books I’ve read (Angry Young Spaceman was my intro to his writing) but the first he wrote.
That shows a little — the first-novel-ness does. I think this is because Spaceman is really good at [...]

by G.K. Wuori
ISBN: 0965025441
There are eighteen single-word titled stories in this volume, weighing in at a bit under 300 pages. They are divided into six sections: Land, Love, Law, Learning, Loss, Life.
Which is to say that Wuori is a pretty organized guy, and a writer who leans a bit on gimmicks. The big gimmick here [...]

by Leif Enger
ISBN: 0802139256
I decided to read this book based on a comment Steve made when I reviewed The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.
This is the kind of novel that I think about as a story book for grownups. The narrator — Reuben Land, age approximately eleven during this story– is consciously telling the reader [...]

edited by Diana Schutz
ISBN: 1569718202
I picked up this slim anthology (just under a hundred pages) because I had read and liked several of the contributors — James Kochalka, Craig Thompson, and Jason Hall & Matt Kindt — and the idea that contributors were just told to do something that would work with the title [...]

by Richard Russo
ISBN: 0375726403
I got into this book: when I wasn’t reading it I was thinking about it, and I wanted to spend all the time I could reading it. This is somewhat surprising, because five years ago it probably would’ve made me too angry to read it at all. (Not that the book has [...]