The Quick and The Dead: A Review by Matthew Salesses

This is the fourteenth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project “Thoughts are infusorial,” says Nurse Daisy, bard of Green Palms nursing home and one of the many characters populating Joy Williams’s sharp-as-the-reaper’s-scythe The [...]

Listening

Greetings from Korea (insert postcard of neon crosses lighting up the Busan skyline here). I’ve been thinking, probably unsurprisingly, about communication. Maybe it’s that I’ve been reading Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead, with its fantastically strange dialogue (review pending), or maybe it’s just the whole idea of two weddings, one Korean and one [...]

Vote for Your Favorite Books

The end of the year approaches, and with it, the closing of Fringe’s 25 Books Poll. In a nutshell, we were appalled that the New York Times top 25 list included only 2 women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list. We vowed to make our own list, where the [...]

The Witch of Portobello: A Review by Julia Henderson

Okay, I know. I wrote my review of The History of Love and gushed about it, and now you’re all going to think that I only write gushy reviews. But here’s the thing…this book *really* made me think about who I am and where I am going, and who I want to be as a [...]

The First Page

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can tell from [...]

Lonely?

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) Well, [...]

Blogging through the Culinary Underbelly

This year, for the second time in my writing life, I thought about participating in Nanowrimo. When I did Nano before, in 2003, I wrote an awful 50,000 word genre novel. I didn’t pretend it was serious work, but I was proud of the accomplishment. There’s something intimidating about a novel–all that time, and all [...]

Vote for the Best Novel of the Last 25 Years

Here at Fringe, we love novels, writers of color, and women writers (along with a whole lot of other things like feminism, culture, and judging from our blog tags, more feminism). That’s why the New York Times’ list of the Best 25 Novels of the Last 25 Years made us sad. (As the Guerilla Girls [...]

Bastard Out of Carolina: A Review by Elizabeth Stark

This is the twelfth of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project. Dorothy Allison’s devastating novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was the last fiction book I read before entering journalism school. The day I started [...]

Heartbreak Hotel by Gabrielle Burton: A Review by Katie Spencer

This is the eleventh of a many-part series written by the staff and editors of Fringe Magazine, who will be reviewing books from the Pool as part of the 25 Books Project. Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel runs each of its engines at full capacity. It is completely intelligent, completely feminist, completely hilarious, completely furious, completely [...]