My friend Gray Kane (@graykane), has recently released his novel Controlled Accident on an unsuspecting public through smashwords and kindle. He asked me to review it. Here it goes: Controlled Accident is positioned as a game of chess played between a larger-than-life performance con artist named Jack and a savvy proto-emo kid named Louis. The [...]

Always a question grad students have to answer to their non-academic kin, what are you doing with your life? In the end, an academic answer won’t do, of course, but it will do to rehearse one amongst us, in the silence of our shops. Against the idea of the eternal, there is the idea that [...]

I’m obviously still a sucker for a moving finale. In the case of this novel I was a sucker for the whole thing. Written in very simple prose, almost as if the book was a series of screenshots, the story has time to develop through an A, B, C and then F plot that I [...]

The first time I realized I was the only Hispanic graduate student in the English Department at the University of Virginia was the only time I thought it was funny. I remember being in the chair’s office —Michael Levenson at the time— when I let the fact out as a joke to break the ice. [...]

The history of this novel is as rife with injustice as its contents. Having been famous for not having been read by anyone, the novel is probably not even a novel. The ‘thing’ is very episodic, with only a few reoccurring characters whose lives don’t really amount to a plot. If there is a main character here it would [...]