Book Review: THE LOVE BOOK by Ken Wohlrob

K. Wohlrob, The Love Book. New York: Bully Press, 2007. Fiction. 216 pages. ISBN: 978-0615171425.

These stories of sex and death, attraction and repulsion, men and women, start out in a gritty mode, exposing the less pretty realities of some of life's unfortunates. One triumph of The Love Book is the tenderness Wohlrob reveals in the course of writing each relationship, a raw and recognizable humanity he brings to the surface in places the reader least expects: Compassion for just the characters with whom I was most uncomfortable crept over me in absorbing Wohlrob's deft and distilled prose. The stories in The Love Book are never veiled autobiography, but add up to an original vision all Wohlrob's own, one that has been piercingly and wisely lived, felt, and imagined. Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, short fiction, suburban fiction, small press fiction, New Jersey authors, Italian-American authors.

Book Review: STORIES by Scott McClanahan

S. McClanahan, Stories. Pittsburgh: Six Gallery Press, 2009. Fiction. 146 pages. ISBN: 978-0981009124.

Scott McClanahan is one of the most refreshing writers of fiction I've read in a long time. I love his debut collection, STORIES, which revives the pleasures of the age-old art of storytelling. McClanahan's narrator is funny and profane, at least a little bit self-depricating but somehow always compassionate to his subjects. As a writer, McClanahan is smart and hilarious, evoking layers of pathos from the twists and turns his stories and narration take. His tales revisit familiar Appalachian characters, small-town disasters, and gothic themes that Flannery O'Connor, Breece D'J Pancake, or Tom Waits could love (lost limbs, jailtime, disfigured strippers, hit-and-runs, the small-town down-and-out), but the tone of the narrator makes them something I've never heard before, immediate and contemporary. With many more stories up his sleeve, McClanahan is going places. Highly recommended for collections of: contemporary fiction, short stories, young authors of fiction, Appalachian fiction, small press fiction, first-person fiction, rural fiction, or West Virginia fiction.