Joseph Peschel
Joseph Peschel, a freelance writer and critic in South Dakota, can be reached at joe@josephpeschel.com or through his blog at http://josephpeschel.com/HaveWords/.
Ross Barkan’s Demolition Night
By Joseph PeschelDemolition Night, Ross Barkan’s first novel, tells the story of a not-too-distant, dystopic future so terrible for most people that a young woman and her friend go back in time to change the future by killing the woman who gave birth to America’s despot president.
Ian Frisch's Magic is Dead
By Joseph PeschelIan Frisch, a young Brooklyn freelance journalist, expected only a long article about the "mind of a magician" to emerge from his contacts with underground magic performers. Frisch has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Playboy, and Wired.
Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys
By Joseph PeschelWhitehead’s newest novel The Nickel Boys, is a realistic depiction of another era in African-American history: the post Jim Crow era in Florida, and it’s set primarily in the 1960s and 1970s.
T.C. Boyle's Outside Looking In
By Joseph PeschelFew living, serious novelists know more about magic mushrooms and LSD-25 than T. Coraghessan Boyle. The author of Drop City (2005) and a trove of other fiction even looks the part.
Karen Russell's Orange World and Other Stories
By Joseph PeschelWith her third story collection, Orange World, Karen Russell continues to create a fictive world where fantasy, horror, humor, science-fiction, and realism co-exist.
Run Me To Earth
By Joseph PeschelPaul Yoon’s new novel, his second, Run Me to Earth, takes place during the Laotian Civil War. While the Vietnam War rages on, Laos is engaged in a civil war between the Soviet-supported, communist Pathet Lao and the American-backed Royal Lao Government throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.
Lily Tuck’s Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories
By Joseph PeschelThe collection’s best story is “Carl Schurz Park,” which concerns a murder and one of the murderers. In other stories, a woman finds a dead swan; people pictured in a 1950s photograph inspire a character study; and a fellow called Yann Johansen harasses a woman, once a Rajneeshee cultist, with odd and accusatory emails.
Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
By Joseph PeschelRumaan Alam, a Brooklynite himself, begins his third novel, Leave the World Behind (2020), as if it were a domestic comedy of manners about a Brooklyn family on vacation in Long Island. Alam transforms the story, with its serious and witty commentary on social class and race relations, into a psychological thriller—a dystopian tale about the end of the world.
Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections
By Joseph PeschelDanielle Evans is a superb short-story writer whose first story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010), published 10 years ago, was a co-winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, the Paterson Prize for Fiction, and an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway award.
Where We Come From by Oscar Cásares
By Joseph Peschel“Every morning there’s a long line of women on the bridge coming over to work, and then at night they go back across to their families in Matamoros. Right or wrong, legal or illegal, seen or ignored, that’s how things work here.”
Transcendent Kingdom
By Joseph PeschelYaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, blends science and religion, the past and present, in a story about a small Ghanaian family that immigrates to Alabama.
Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest
By Joseph PeschelA sense of the communal persists in Jonathan Lethem’s fiction, but, within these imagined and would-be idealized communities, anarchy, the threat of violence, and violence itself percolates and sometimes even thrives.
Red Pill
By Joseph PeschelHari Kunzru's sixth novel is loaded with pop-culture allusions, political buzz phrases, and snippets of writing from historical characters, all hovering around a backdrop of far-right social manipulation.
