Nathan Deuel has contributed to Harper’s, GQ, and The New York Times, among others. His debut collection of essays, Friday Was the Bomb, will be published by Dzanc in May 2014. He lives in Los Angeles.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
The Tender Underbelly of Soldiers: Phil Klay’s Lives During Wartime
Klay’s nearly universally acclaimed collection — about our experiences of warfare, on the ground and on the home front — though promising, is deeply flawed....
A Life in Our Hands: Community, Crime, and Punishment
In stitching together a wholly imagined but realistically nightmarish situation, Ball toys with our desire to know what maybe can't be known…...
Ye Who Enter, Abandon Hope: Hell Is a Hospital in Lore Segal's "Half the Kingdom"
In Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom, the end of days is here…...
Reality Strikes
Reality TV ab-idol in a madcap novel....
FICTION: NEW & NOTEWORTHY
Reality Strikes: Nathan Deuel on MARK HASKELL SMITH's Raw Down and Out in the Digital South: Robert Rea on SCOTT McCLANAHAN's ...
A Former Soviet Union: Elliott Holt's "You Are One of Them"
It's the season of the expatriate....
Boats Are in Trees and Photocopiers Are on the Beach: Lucy Corin’s “One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses”
There’s enough sparkling, frightening imagination in each piece of this collection to make us fear Corin might know something we don’t....
Total Eclipse of the Bar: Nathan Deuel on ‘Turn Around Bright Eyes’
What’s your karaoke song? Rob Sheffield, one of the best music writers around, on love and ritual....
Rising Temperatures: Maggie O'Farrell's "Instructions for a Heatwave"
Following one sprawling family over four days of searing temperatures in 1976 London, Instructions for a Heatwave – O'Farrell's sixth novel – is perhaps a perfect book....
Life in Beirut
Triptych image: Antonio Adriano Puleo, "Untitled (47c)" 2013NOBODY DIED. But Beirut is engulfed in flames, cars are mangled, glass is under ...
How to Succeed — in a Van, and Otherwise
IN THE EARLY 2000s, an otherwise unremarkable student named Ken Ilgunas was half-heartedly working as a Home Depot clerk and attending ...
Finding Words For What Is Horrible: Aleksandar Hemon's "The Book of My Lives"
I WAS A NIHILIST," writes Aleksandar Hemon, "and lived with my parents. I even started thinking up an Anthology of Irrelevant ...
Fear is Fun: Nathaniel Rich's "Odds Against Tomorrow"
A COLLEGE CLASSROOM STRUGGLES to focus on a lecture while, behind the tweed shoulders of the professor, an overhead projector streams ...
Getting Out of the Picture: On Being Nick Flynn
A SINGLE MOTHER in Massachusetts reads through her son’s notebook and shoots herself. Still grieving, the son ends up ...
Take It From a Soldier: On Kevin Powers's "Yellow Birds"
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, we've been sending soldiers over there, and when they come back we say thanks, but we ...
In Praise of Nightmares: Josip Novakovich's "Shopping for a Better Country"
GROWING UP, MY SISTER and I spent Tuesday nights at an art studio across town. The air conditioner sputtered, and we ...
