FICTION: NEW & NOTEWORTHY
By Alizah Salario, Geoff Mak, Ira Wells, Ryan BubaloDecember 25, 2013
Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 288 pages.
The Facades by Eric Lundgren. Overlook. 221 pages.
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner. Scribner. 400 pages.
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. Little, Brown. 240 pages.
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2013 IN REVIEW: Rachel Kushner’s THE FLAMETHROWERS and Caleb Crain’s NECESSARY ERRORS
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Trude Love: Alizah Salario on Eric Lundgren's THE FACADES
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The Departed: Ira Wells on Robert Stone's DEATH OF THE BLACK-HAIRED GIRL
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Danger Close: The Iraq War in American Fiction
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LARB Contributors
Alizah Salario is a journalist and essayist. Her work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, at the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.
Geoff Mak is a writer who lives in New York and Los Angeles. His literary features have appeared frequently in Forbes and Flavorwire. He has recently completed his first novel.
Ira Wells is a Toronto-based culture writer and the author of Fighting Words: Polemics and Social Change in Literary Naturalism. He has written essays and opinion pieces for The New Republic, American Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, Canada’s National Post, and elsewhere. Follow on Twitter at @Ira_Wells
Ryan Bubalo lived in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, from 2008-2010. He taught English and helped design the Academic Preparation Program at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. He also coached the university's first women's basketball team, which was featured in the award-winning documentary Salaam Dunk. He currently lives in Seattle and is finishing his own Iraq war novel entitled Time of Our Choosing.
LARB Staff Recommendations
Trude Love
The Facades is not so much a whodunit as a whoamI.
The Departed
Robert Stone’s novels play by their own rules.