These poems were all written in brief moments while sitting in my cubicle. The initial premise was that I would write a love poem for my fiance everyday.

#1, #2, #3, #5, #6, #7, #8, #10

 Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

Go Ask Alice is fake. I need to state that immediately on the offset chance some misguided, angry youth is handed this book by an under-funded, under-educated counselor and Googles the title. Those five words are the most important words one can take from this review. The caveat stated, indulge me.…

Flash back to being a fourteen year-old skater from the Bay Area living in Utah. Riding a ski lift with a few snowboard friends, Mike Brown tells me about this pretty cool book to check out called Go Ask Alice. Most of my friends are young potheads and chemical experimenters. I’m afraid of drugs at this age, but I store the name of the book to look up later (always a fan of counter-culture). Now, luckily, Mike Brown turned out alright (you can check SLUG Magazine or his zine Leviathan for proof), but what worries me is the more timid curious. Luckily, I did not read Go Ask Alice for fourteen years. But suppose I had.

I was not a particularly naïve teenager, but I was still young enough to take some things for granted. If a book pronounced to be written by an anonymous fifteen-year old, I took it to be true. I was too young to understand that no one would challenge this statement seriously, and even if they did, the publisher would never be required to insert a prologue. This isn’t Frey using lies to make millions. No author garners fame for this work.

This book claims to be written by a teenager, claims to speak to teenagers as a teenager. It’s directed to at-risk socially-confused teenagers. It portrays someone who is tricked into drug use, raped, forcibly coerced into more drug use, and then attacked by drug users. And then it ends with an alleged overdose. Teenagers beware: drugs are bad.

Note the facts. There are many bizarre errors throughout the text. For instance, the timeline compresses and expands without any regard for accuracy. The “author” neglects to mention one of her birthdays, and then when a year rolls around, she mentions this new birthday but her age is wrong. Throughout the book entries are created haphazardly without an awareness of how much time passes between them. If you are distracted by the content you may not pay attention to these details, but if you question the authenticity.…

No one pretends that drugs don’t kill. No one pretends that drugs aren’t addictive. But drugs don’t lie. They offer to fuck you up. That is all they have ever offered and that is all users should ask. Go Ask Alice lies. It was written by a fellow Utahan, a child psychologist. Realizing that this woman (Beatrice Sparks) lives within fifty miles of me makes me ill. How dare you try to lie to me when I was a child.

 Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

This book is pushed as The Diary of a Young Girl for the Bosnian War. When I asked my Bosnian con vivant why she had never told me about this book she said, “Well, you should have asked me. I could have told you we had a little Anne Frank.” Sadly the book only seems to be referenced as the lesser Anne Frank with the caveat: well Zlata was younger, so the book is not written as well. There is something to be said for this condemnation. Anne Frank constructs a better narrative. However, there are many other things to discuss about Zlata’s Diary. For instance, Zlata was aware of Anne Frank when she wrote it, so, in a sense, Zlata’s Diary is an absolutely modern re-interpretation of Frank’s work. Here everything is “more” modern, pushed much further into modernity. You had a war where Aryans exterminated Jews? We have a war where everyone exterminates everyone else. You had concentration or “labor camps.” We don’t even make the pretense of labor. Our author is beautiful, highly educated and two years younger than your Frank. Oh? Anne kept a private journal for herself that captured all of her hopes and fears? Zlata did the same thing all the while contending with reporters, interviews, and photographers. You think it’s easy to convey innocence when consorting with the media, think again. Zlata captures it all in a televised war all the while dealing with the constant interruptions of continuous shelling. This book is a dynamo in the war-diary series.

I do recommend this book to all readers as the average adult should be able to cut through it in a few short days. More aptly, one should substitute it for all of the outdated texts that young students have to read in middle school. Why not educate children about history through the voice of one of their own? Then try to wrap their skulls around how the rest of the world stood back and allowed one group of people to butcher their brothers and sisters. Kudos to you, Nineties. You think guilt is merely a turn-of-the-millennium attribute?

 Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

Eisenberg’s book reeks of the post-September 11th New York City she calls home. Several of the stories are set in New York City, and one in particular deals directly with the event. My two favorite stories from the book (“Like It Or Not” and “Window”), though, have absolutely nothing to do with New York City. In these two stories, Eisenberg’s development of characters is its richest, and the rapidity of her minimalist prose is slowed down. She hits her stride in these works and it is fantastic. Contrast this to the title story (“Twilight of the Superheroes”) and “Some Other, Better Otto” where one can feel excessively rushed by the prose or confused trying to remember who was whom. This isn’t to say that Eisenberg is a flawed writer by any stretch, far from it. Personally, I want to explore more of her works, and I would be thrilled to read a novel. It’s simply that I think she gets too ahead of herself or relies on the reader’s desire to comb through each story syllable by syllable. This may prove to be the case if college fiction professors decide to start teaching her. In the meantime, I will look for a collection that capitalizes on her strengths like stylistically tight prose written without fear of sacrificing clarity for character development. One does not have to cut all of the fat from the story; some sentences are going to have to do the boring work.

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

In the Miso Soup is an extraordinary novel for those who enjoy post-modern works like Don Delillo’s The Great Jones Street or Bret Ellis’s early works (and I emphasize early works, because he has only grown progressively worse with each publication). Set in modern Tokyo, the novel follows Kenji, a sex-trade tour guide, as he entertains the bizarre, overweight American tourist named Frank. Very early in their relationship something about Frank disturbs Kenji. This reaches a very graphic and disturbing crescendo in the middle of the novel.

I read in the author’s note that Murakami was somewhat involved with the ultra-violent movies being made in Japan (movies like Tokyo Decadence) that have been shipped overseas and are influencing things like the Saw and Hostel movies. Personally, I think they are overrated and are basically taking the obvious next step that Seven outlined. There is an ultra-violent scene in the middle of this novel. If Murakami is involved with these Japanese movies, I am going to leave it at that, because gratuitous violence is boring and has been done.

What makes In the Miso Soup brilliant is everything that happens after that scene. If the novel had ended after page 143, I would have shrugged and filed it away as a cheap Less Than Zero or American Psycho rip-off. Instead, it powers on for another seventy-five pages. This is where the novel stands on its own. Murakami makes no apologies for Frank, but still manages to explore the psychology of his character in such a way as to reflect on the exchange of culture between the United States and Japan. It is an impressive feat.

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen 

There was a period of time (maybe a decade ago?) when Elmore Leonard was the man about town. Tarantino had made Jackie Brown, Soderberg made Out of Sight, and someone (I can’t remember) made Get Shorty. I waited out the initial flush of Leonard-excitement and didn’t read any of his books. Over the next few years I read interviews with Elmore Leonard and started formulating the idea that Leonard was a literary writer and not just a storyteller.

And then I read Freaky Deaky. . . .

Was that too easy?

Freaky Deaky is not literature. It is storytelling at best and even then a bit boring. The plot revolves around several cliché characters who serve as narrative functions more than people. My assumption is that Leonard has better books. For that reason I don’t want to entirely dismiss him for what might have been an off book. I will read some of his others.

However, avoid THIS book. I had hoped for a Dan Brown (yes, I’ve read them all): something quick and suspenseful. Something I could read on an airplane or on the beach, drunk or sober. Freaky Deaky met these criteria so I shouldn’t be bitter. Nevertheless, I am bitter, because even though I was capable of plodding through his flat dialogue and shallow plot, I had still hoped for an entertaining twist or turn. There was nothing like that here.

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

The detective genre, dangling like a slab of lamb over a pack of hyenas, has appealed to experimental writers since its nascence. What better analogy for existentialism than man on a prolonged journey to seek missing identities? While many of the Twentieth Century’s greatest writers (see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michael Chabon, and David Markson) experimented within this genre, one of the premier examples is Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

It is with deserved respect that this work catapulted Auster’s career into the mainstream. The work collects three novellas Auster wrote that all explore the protagonists’ identities and challenge the genre’s conventions. In the third, and in my opinion, the best of these works, The Locked Room, Auster breaks the fourth wall to outline an agenda, “The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about” (Auster, 346). Can one assumed that since the protagonist has become aware of the frame (The New York Trilogy) and named the two novellas prior to The Locked Room that Auster stepped in for the protagonist and pulled the curtain back? One can be skeptical, since the appearance of a poet named Paul Auster in City of Glass. By the third novella, the reader will be quite accustomed to questioning every detail revealed by the narrators.

Regardless of whether the three novellas are really the same story (and I would argue they are not), The Locked Room rewardingly ends the trilogy. This is the piece where Auster’s attention shifts to characters’ relations and interactions. In that way, this is the piece that becomes far more personal for the reader. While meta-critical experiments still take place, The Locked Room is far more about the universe of the characters than the questions that their existence imply. Read The New York Trilogy; read it with a pen and chock it full of notes. The language is beautiful. But if the experimentation and post-structural play immediately turn you off, make your way through The Locked Room. You will be well rewarded.

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

It would be very surprising if Shelley Jackson had never read Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Both novels explore protagonists with deformities, both novels use split narratives, and both novels engage small town-settings. While Jackson’s novel brings Dunn’s novel to mind, these comparisons may be slightly reaching. Jackson explored the social effects and political aspects of her novel’s conceit (that two-headed [conjoined] twins are now commonplace in society, the effect of nuclear radiation), whereas Dunn focused more closely on the familial relationship of her protagonists and questions about societal exclusion.

Half Life follows parallel storylines concerning the conjoined twins Nora and Blanche. The chronologically earlier of the two storylines begins with the twins’ parents and conception. It explores the twins’ family through their childhood. The second storyline follows Nora (Blanche has been asleep for over a decade) through her adult life. She works in San Francisco as a phone sex operator and lives with two idiosyncratic roommates. When Nora learns that a doctor in London is performing “unity” operations (decapitating one twin’s head), she thinks she’s found a way to finally become singular.

Jackson is quite adept at exploring the complications of identity and responsibility in the hypothetical context of conjoined twins. Can you really be an individual when not even your body is yours? She also includes selections from “The Siamese Twin Reference Manual,” the scrap-book Nora constructs with everything that interests her concerning conjoined twins and her specific situation.

Although it can be difficult to follow, the novel is at its best when the two sisters wrestle for control of the narrative. Jackson’s decision to portray the twins struggling for control of the narration is well executed (hauntingly subtle, even), and I think the novel could have benefited from more of it. This being said the novel still runs a bit long and could have used some strategic editing. By the end of the work, the reader can’t help but smirk at the notion that a novel called Half Life runs probably twice as long as it should.

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

Shantaram begins with the protagonist sneaking out of Australia on a flight to Bombay. Very early on, he meets a beautiful woman who advises him to surrender to India. This more than the gun smuggling, more than the prison escape, more than the Russian-Afghanistan war is what Gregory David Roberts’s book is about. This giant first novel is the portrayal of a man’s quest for understanding in a very traditional, visiting-the-Oracle sense.  Only in this version the Oracle vacillates between a Bombay Mafia kingpin named Abdel Khader Khan and a series of intense, borderline unbelievable experiences. That being said, this novel is full of these experiences that continually urge the reader to question their veracity (far more than Frey’s A Few Million Pieces). Yet, they are allegedly Roberts’s own. The author was incarcerated in an Australian maximum security prison where he did escape to India and did spend many years involved with the Bombay mafia. Those facts alone can drive the reader through the book and Roberts baits the reader with chapter openings like Chapter Twenty-Eight’s, “In my first knife fight I learned that there are two type of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill.” Ka. Pow.

What perplexes the reader is the juggling between genre-caliber action sequences (think Clive Cussler) and passage after passage of existential exposition. The mix would so easily seem incongruous, yet is delivered naturally by Roberts’s hand. I think this is why so many prior reviewers have simply said this book is about “everything.” The conceit is the author’s struggle for redemption. Roberts wrote the novel based on his Indian experiences in prison after being recaptured. The redemptive quality, bordering on heavy-handed, rewards the reader with a fuller, deeper understanding and far more insight into what might otherwise be a very foreign read.

This literary tour of India, for the book is about Bombay as much as everything else, is worth the read alone. It will be exciting to see how accurate Johnny Depp’s silver screen adaptation will be. Particularly how well the movie can adapt the content of what otherwise may be six movies crammed into one.

Ultimately, I recommend Shantaram for its insight alone. No other book has ever gone where Shantaram goes, nor goes and achieves such a complicated understanding. It is perplexing to think that one person could live through so many experiences but encouraging to think that one person could have the courage to do so.