nick

I don’t think any HBO original series has aged quite as well as The Wire . Just thinking out loud here…Four years after the finale, universities across the country, Ivy League universities, are updating their course catalogues with classes dedicated to using The Wire as a teaching tool. Be it Journalism, Sociology, Theatre, even American Studies; social sciences across the board are parsing facets of the series to use as a vehicle of study.

I love reading the gothic, particularly the southern variety. When I first began reading novels written in this tradition, many of them didn''t seem to have many dimensions.

It’s tempting to label We the Animals a novella with its language resembling the best of what flash fiction can do: rollicking, lyrical prose, scenes stitched together like snippets of memories, sentences so full of heart they seem to pulsate on the page. Unlike novellas and slip-stream fiction, We the Animals tells a bigger story that’s less on soft, fuzzy edges and more on dimensions and conflicted characters.

In my estimation any book review that can be tagged ‘debut’, somewhere in the body probably would read ‘his/her scope and ambition far exceeds his/her execution and while there are some good ideas therein, much of the plot is meandering, aimless, and poorly developed.’ Fortunately, I am usually quite wrong and although I find it as incalculable as theoretical physics, young writers are publishing astonishing debuts and a dearth of excellent fiction, praise be the heavens, is not imminent.

The first thing one notices when reading Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending , is the impossible elegance of the writing. Henry James elegant. The subject matter certainly lends itself to the tasteful, somber, sometimes playful writing.