Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan

This story collection by a Jesuit priest from Nigeria and Zimbabwe is as focused on a single purpose as any recent work of fiction I can think of. The stories are about endangered children in Africa, and needless to say each one packs a punch.

“My Parents Bedroom”, as calmly violent as Yukio Mishima’s “Patriotism”, presents a Hutu husband forced by a neighborhood mob to kill his …

As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which …

I never thought I’d praise three out of three geopolitical articles in a New York Times Book Review, and then complain about a Nicholson Baker piece. But that’s what’s happening today.

Don’t get me wrong: Nicholson Baker remains somewhat near the Zeus position in my personal pantheon of contemporary writers I really, really approve of. It’s because he’s so versatile, though, that I’m disappointed to find the Book Review invariably assigning him books so far up his alley (a book that reprints …

1. There’s an excerpt of My Name Is Will (a novel of sex, drugs and Shakespeare) on NPR.org. I mention this mainly so that I can segue into this: Shakespeare got to get paid.

2. What classic work of literature are you embarrassed to have never read? These writers admit their shame, so I think you should too. That is, if you’re one to be ashamed for not having read certain books.

3. Blokes bribed with beer to read books. To fool them …

Adam Cohen, contributing here for the first time, is a student at Hunter College in New York City, a bookstore employee, a Brooklynite from Long Island, and a poet whose work has appeared in The City Poetry, Thieves Jargon, Wandering Army, and Zygote In My Coffee. — Levi

There is something irrational and impractical about the beauty of the late Charles Bukowski’s work. His writing is unfriendly, solitary and blatantly subjective, yet unabashed for its own cause in its steady delivery. Few have ever put themselves …

1. Shirley Jackson on “The Lottery” at Shaken and Stirred: “People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.”

2. Jessa Crispin on William and Henry James, who are a favorite of mine as well, and also obviously a favorite of a novelist named Richard Liebmann-Smith, whose new The James Boys posits a strange scenario wherein Henry …

It’s alarming to hear that the Los Angeles Times’ budget cuts have doomed its Sunday Book Review, which will cease to exist as a standalone section of the paper after this weekend’s issue. This announcement was blunt and sudden, and now, protests aside, the deed appears to be done.

The Los Angeles Times will remain a lively presence in the bookosphere, and those of us who read their literary articles online may barely notice the disappearance of the standalone weekly publication. I’ve …

So, while Levi was busy getting married, I was busy watching him getting married and then doing the Hokey Pokey at the reception. And then when I came back home, my refrigerator broke, my computer crashed, my blog’s database exploded, and then when I tried to log in to write my post here, WordPress was all, “Access DENIED. No, seriously. Go away.” The moral of this story is, of course, don’t come back from vacation. Take it from me. It’s a bad idea.

Anyway, even though …

Cost, Roxana Robinson’s tense novel about a disintegrating American family, begins in a mood of heightened sensitivity. Katherine, an elegant elderly woman visiting her adult daughter, caresses her combs and frets that she is losing her memory. Her daughter Julia roams the kitchen of her Maine beach house, “her movements hurried, slightly inept”, and when she opens a jar of mayonnaise she feels the glass threads give way beneath her hands.

This moments of awareness, the reader …

I’m physically back from the honeymoon, but mentally not completely back yet. LitKicks will return in just a couple more days — good stuff is on the way! — and I’ll catch up with the Book Review next weekend.

Here’s what we’ve been doing:

See you very soon!