Allan Gurganus – White People (1990)
White People is one of those collections which instead of having a title story to anchor the collection has unifying themes and subject matter binding the stories together. There is a set of explicitly interlinked stories, and the rest of the stories are still unified by the aforementioned criteria of themes and subject-matter, but also…More
The Hobbit, or, The Greatest Movie Tie-In Edition of a Book Ever Published
One of my bookish interests is an amateur appreciation I have for good book design, and it’s something that may come up now and again here as part of The Booked Escape Plan. I first became interested in noting quality book design when the fantasy novel, The Way of Kings, was published in 2010, so…More
Oreo at Play
[The following is a book review of a novel that had spent years on my list of “Books I Need to Find” before I finally got a hold of a copy. I attempted to send this book review out for publication, but there simply is not a magazine that is interested in reviews of books…More
The Recent Renaissance in Short Story Republication
Written for and dedicated to a friend who is seeking to learn about and read more short fiction, by its most passionate reader & connoisseur (and its lousiest practitioner). Thank you for always being as supportive of my life efforts, including my writing. You’re as good a human being as they come. The last few…More
Jack Green, Gaddis, and the Book Review Industry
After so many years of searching, I have finally read Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! Written initially as a series of three consecutively-printed self-published zines (issues 12-14 of Jack Green’s self-published project which he simply called newspaper (the lower-case n is as important to him as it is to mathematicians but for very different reasons…More
Fighting Words: The 1978 Gardner-Gass Debate
After graduating with his degrees in Illinois near where he grew up, comedic genius Stanley Elkin got a gig in 1960 as a member of faculty at Missouri’s Washington University. He worked there until his passing in 1995. In that time, he received a PhD, wrote tons of excellent works of black humor fiction, and…More
Chewing Bubblegum
Though requiring some patience at first, Adam Levin’s recent novel Bubblegum (2020) is a mature, inventive and often hilarious novel. The payoff is enormous: formally inventive in its labeled parts: chapters, sections, parts, or subordinate “books” which make up the novel or book as a whole; as well as linguistically inventive in its style of…More
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The Booked Escape Plan 