John C Summitt

When I was young my grandmother used to come visit and I played Scrabble with her. She'd sit at the table for what seemed like hours, lips pressed together, arranging and rearranging her tiles. Finally with an expression of triumph she would lay down most of her rack of tiles to form some absolutely beautiful word that netted her, oh, ten points or so. Dan Simmons finally gets around to letting us in on the mystery surrounding Hyperion but too often he is writing beautiful passages instead of winning the game. This triumph of style–and he is good–over substance leaves the characters falling short of qualities that allow reading empathy and identification and make the aesthetic digressions tedious to bear. The material in this book and the preceding Hyperion would have made one fine shorter novel; as it is it's like a beautiful Christmas tree with too much glitter and lights.

To read this book is to fall down the rabbit hole into some smoky circle of Hell with Hemingway and Orwell and occasionally Kerouac as your tour guides. War is about death and Dispatches captures the insanity and psychic rot that permeates the landscape of war–particularly, it would seem–this war, and also the fascination and even addiction to it. If one has ever read Hemingway's Soldier's Home and wondered at the disconnect between Krebs and his family and normal life, Dispatches describes what was in Krebs' head. Highly recommended.

A solid collection of stories by an author who is adept at creating a wide variety of characters and finding those moments of revelation in their lives.

Howard Campbell agrees to act as a spy for his country and in the process becomes a better Nazi than the real ones. Darkly humorous with a parade of offbeat characters that cause Campbell to reflect on the moral consequences of his life as a spy.

This is the book Dennis Lehane wished he wrote when he wrote Coronado. The format is reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (it even takes place in Ohio). It is a series of loosely interrelated stories that collectively create a portrait of the community of Knockemstiff. It is a collection of sad sacks and losers living dead end lives in a town where the only thing that is happening is entropy. Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song in which the characters suffer all sorts of misfortunes,yet “at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” The people of Knockemstiff rarely find those reasons, yet they keep on living and there's something compelling in that.