Though every story in "Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge" is excellent, incisive, moving, the collection as a whole never quite coheres: there are 52 passionate arguments being made in the 52 stories, but a person coming to Orner for the first time might feel that each story is mostly arguing with itself.
As Lohrey says, there are too many incisive moments in this collection to feel comfortable naming a few.
In the midst of a run at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, "The Coast of Utopia" has already made a surprise backlist hit of Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers," a collection of incisive portraits of Herzen, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and others.
The novelist Joan Didion published two collections of incisive social and literary commentary, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979).
But Michael Greenberg, a native New Yorker, loves the city as a child loves a parent, and in its honor he has put together a collection of tightly written, incisive chapters, each another tessera or tile in a big mosaic — and like tesserae, they are all placed at a slightly different angle to the light.
It's an extraordinary collection: complex, sad and psychologically incisive.
Another author might struggle to manage such an esoteric collection, but Mr Ball's writing is incisive enough to keep the different elements hanging and working together like a finely tuned Alexander Calder mobile.One section deals with the teeming microworld.
Martin Dyar's poetry collection Maiden Names (Arlen House) is both poignant and incisive, while Nigel McDowell's children's novel The Black North (Hot Key) is a great read and a cunning reworking of Irish history and lore into fantasy.
A collection of almost 40 years of articles by an incisive, durable observer whose chief watchtowers have been The New Yorker, The New Republic and Newsweek, and who is at his best when his product is color commentary in the Mencken-Kempton-Liebling-Buckley tradition.
A collection of almost 40 years of articles by an incisive, durable observer whose chief watchtowers have been The New Yorker, The New Republic and Newsweek, and who is best when his product is color commentary in the Mencken-Kempton-Liebling-Buckley tradition.
