(Apprentice House, May 2013)

Review by Brett Sholtis

Reflections in Broken Glass

Describing Flashes of War as a short story collection is kind of like calling Pink Floyd’s The Wall “a bunch of songs.” Sure, it’s true, but this debut collection of fiction by Katey Schultz is much more than that. These thirty-one stories, the result of three years of research and interviews, examine the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from disparate, often marginalized, perspectives. An Afghan woman remembers her son who died in a bomb blast. Iraqi civilians from Fallujah languish in a refugee camp. An American woman comes to terms with the death of her husband. A team of Marines witness the capture of their leader. Like shards of glass in the aftermath of an explosion, these stories are at times fragmentary, but like those shards, each story hints at the truth of a larger occurrence.

At her best, Schultz’s storytelling is poignant and nuanced and leaves me certain that her research has paid off. One of her better stories, “Home on Leave,” explores the subtleties of military service and masculinity, as a young man home from his first tour in Iraq struggles to overcome the notion that, because his job as a mechanic kept him within the relative safety of the base, he somehow hasn’t done his duty as a soldier. This is the kind of detail you just can’t fake.

Another one of the best stories is also one of the shortest. “Permanent Wave” centers around one detail of one moment: professional baseball pitcher Michael Pineda tossing a wounded war hero a baseball, so that the vet can throw the opening pitch at a game. Without spoiling the end, I’ll just say that to me this brief story perfectly encapsulates the dilemma of the wounded combat veteran: at once held up by society as the apotheosis of manhood, and yet literally deprived of part of his body.

While the majority of the stories in Flashes of War focus on Americans, Schultz brings a similar acuity to her nine stories with Afghani or Iraqi focus characters. One of my favorites is “Aaseya and Rahim,” about an Afghani couple struggling to get by during the American occupation. Although their marriage was prearranged, their relationship is neither formal nor traditional. Aaseya controls her own sexuality and aspires to attain an education, and despite the forces that brought them together, they really seem to love one another. Perhaps I would be tempted to dislike a duplicitous character like Rahim, who earns a living working for both the American military and the Taliban, but due to Schultz’s skill at placing readers within the boots of her characters, I was left feeling only sympathy for this couple, who had endured not just the Americans, but also the Soviets before them.

That within-the-boots approach is at times compromised when Schultz writes from a first person point of view, as these voices sometimes sound a bit too much like her own strong third person voice. While I may believe one narrator, a soldier, when he says, “Dawson’s quick-witted with his tongue but stupid as a buckshot fawn when we’re on patrol,” my suspension of disbelief fails me when a wounded soldier narrates how, “the sky pulsed overhead like an electric blue ocean,” or when another narrator, an American soldier shooting at a vehicle, asserts that “windows shattered into red-stained slivers of light.”

Schultz doesn’t write in character so much as she takes characters and possesses them. The result is a hyper-realist approach, where Schultz’s fine authorial renderings blend with the blood and guts of those she inhabits.

The net effect of all these stories is that the reader cannot help but ask the big questions about war—these wars in particular, and war in general. Schultz has made an effort to avoid proselytizing, a good choice. For while these stories beg for some overarching interpretation, she seems to follow the advice of Vietnam veteran and acclaimed author Tim O’Brien, who said that real war stories have no moral. Instead, she has collected the evidence, placed it before us, and left us to arrive at our own conclusions.

Brett Sholtis served in the Army as an infantry soldier in Kosovo and an
automations specialist in California. His itinerant career includes work
in motorcycle safety and environmental research. He is a 2013 winner of
the Taube Award in Fiction.

by Andreas Kluth

(Riverhead Books, January 2013)

Review by Clinton Coggins

Kluth’s Triumvirate, or Somewhere in the Alps There are 20 Dead War Elephants

The first book from the Economist’s Andreas Kluth, Hannibal and Me, explores the life and relevance of Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general who employed brilliant military strategy in defeating legions of Romans during the Second Punic War. But this is not a book about warfare. Instead it explores the difference between winning and getting what you want.

Kluth’s Hannibal is not the gallant, bombastic commander who ascends the Alps triumphant on the back of an elephant, as he is sometimes portrayed. (Kluth notes that this march halved his army, including the elephants.) Instead, Kluth reveals Hannibal to be a single-minded genius—brilliant in warfare, but unable to understand it as an extension of peaceful rule.

Kluth mixes autobiographic details with anecdotes from the lives of Hannibal, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and others in an effort to deduce what it is exactly that makes these people great or not so great. Specifically, he narrows his focus to three men: Hannibal, considered to be one of the greatest military tacticians of all time; Scipio, the man who defeated him; and Fabius, the Roman senator and statesman who helped Rome recover from a string of devastating military defeats at Hannibal’s hands. Kluth’s narrative insight and research highlights the unique symbiosis of the triumvirate of Hannibal, Scipio, and Fabius—each man made whole by the existence of the others, at times enemies, and at times allies.

The book is, on the whole, remarkably cohesive in theme and scope, blending the stories of characters as disparate as Cleopatra and Niels Bohr, while maintaining certain foci throughout. Familial relationships and the legacies they leave for each individual is one such theme: “Some adolescents, like Hannibal and his brothers, try to emulate their parents…Other children… rather, search for their mother or father…A third type of adolescent…will neither emulate nor search for their father or mother but rebel.”

Hannibal and Scipio fall firmly into the first category. In the temple to Baal in Cartegena, Hannibal swore an oath with his father to “use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome,” honoring the thunder god for which he was named (Hannibal means “grace of Baal.”)

Scipio too seems to have been strongly influence by his paternal relationship, witnessing his father fall as he diverted Hannibal’s forces to protect his fleeing son. Scipio went on to lead the Roman army to undo this defeat. Both Scipio and Hannibal were fighting the wars of their fathers, victims of generational circumstance, unable to escape.

Another theme Kluth explores is a comparison of Hannibal to Tiger Woods, the feared and scandalized golfer. “Working backward from that pin, Woods knew that he had to win tournaments…and regarded the hole as the unit of success. To Tiger Woods, strokes were the equivalent of tactical maneuvers, holes were battles to be won in order to win the tournaments, which were analogous to wars, and nineteen majors was the…objective.”

To Kluth, Hannibal’s problem was that he focused on single strokes, or victories, instead of Rome’s defeat. In doing so, he allowed Rome to continue and survive, despite decimating its armies through tactical supremacy. Had Hannibal applied Tiger’s approach, each one of his victories would have been designed to weaken Rome as a city-state. Instead, Hannibal focused almost exclusively on warfare itself and the defeat of Roman armies. In response, under Fabius’ leadership, Rome adopted a strategy of non-engagement that weakened Hannibal through attrition, allowing the empire to recover. It was this strategy of non-engagement that kept Hannibal from toppling the empire, despite its tremendous military losses.

The end of Kluth’s book devolves into a tone similar to a Zig Ziglar management book, with platitudes highlighted, numbered, and listed. An example: “Have ‘young’ ideas while you’re young and while you’re old. As you get older, it becomes ever easier to think of reasons not to try something.”

In spite of this weakness, and in spite of an almost pathologically singular reliance on Jungian writing for quotes on the human psyche, overall, book the book is organized, thought-provoking, funny, and at times surprising.

Clinton Coggins, a reader, writer, and editor based in eastern Iowa, works for publications such as The Clock Inside.

(Oxford University Press, 2007)

Review by Caroline Benner Wolff

“What makes a book come to life for you?

Robinson Crusoe is in that rare and enviable position of having a to-do list that he can’t wait to begin each morning. The items on that list are not gimme to-dos. They are hard work to-dos: study the Bible, build a kiln, catch a wild parrot and teach it to talk.  Crusoe, the man famous through literature and history for building a civilization on a deserted island after he was shipwrecked there, thrives on hard work.

When he first looks over his island’s supply of rocks and plants and animals, he doesn’t throw up his hands at the emptiness of it all and return to the beach to get drunk on the rum he salvaged from his ship. Instead he sees the future he will create from those rocks and plants and animals: a main house for him to live in, and a country house; a flock of goats he will tame; baskets, and clay pots, and new clothes.

He takes pride in the challenge and reward of accomplishment, recording each in order to relive them in a journal.  Perhaps in the evenings, he ran fingers made languid by a sense of peace that only comes after enormous effort over his the memories on his journal pages:  “made a chair,” “made a table,”  “cut a beam.” Sometimes the day’s progress was tiny: no matter. To him, it was still quite something: Shaved some inches of wood off of the side of a plank that one distant day will become a shelf, he reported one day.

Crusoe just doesn’t give up. His projects often begin with the sort of opening moves that would make quitters out of most of us. To make a shelf, he needed to start by cutting down a tree. To make baskets, he needed to find reeds, but there were none suitable.

When he does quit, it’s not the self-generated plagues of frustration and doubt that take him out. It is only overwhelming practical impediments to success.  He built a canoe that was too heavy to drag up a hill to the nearest water. No problem, he leveled the hill.  Still, he couldn’t move the canoe.  It was only when he realized that his next option—building a canal to the canoe—would take him 10 years that he reluctantly quit.

I admire Crusoe’s full-bodied enthusiasm for hard work. For me, too often, work is an eking out, a getting by. Today, I am reading a paper for an English class, a to-do item that is a tiny step on the way to the MFA degree. To understand the paper’s introduction, I need to understand what “occidental modernity” means.  This is a term that doesn’t yield fully to a dictionary or Google, so I read the sentences above and below and hope for an uncertain sense of the phrase.

I tentatively move into the next section, absorb a little bit, lose the thread, surf the Internet.  Then: a half page, then surf, then a dignified number of paragraphs, then surf, now—please don’t let it get this bad! —a paragraph, then surf. These breaks are not the satisfied rest that follows good work but are instead are moments of avoidance. I’m doing nothing I would record with pride in a journal.

In Robinson Crusoe, I see a man with a beautiful ability to work. Someone who is calibrated differently than I might see a dictator who subjugates every man who arrives on his island to his will. Another reader might see a perfect example of a spiritual awakening in Crusoe or literature’s first capitalist.  The same peculiar alchemy that leads us to marry some people and shun others exists between us as readers and our characters. The most well-read books perform different acts for each new reader they meet.

I am the new editor of the “previously published books” section of Hot Metal Bridge’s book reviews and I would like to invite you to tell us how your favorite books of all time live for you. What is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever read?  Flip through an ancient paperback: which page corners did you fold down long ago and why? What did a book teach you about yourself? What was on the tip of your tongue in English class last semester that you never got the chance to say? Write about it for Hot Metal Bridge.

Caroline Benner Wolff is one of the book review editors for Hot Metal Bridge.

University of Pittsburgh faculty member Peter Trachtenberg is the author of three books, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning and his latest, Another Insane Devotion, an ethics of love disguised as a memoir of the author’s relationship with cats.

Last spring, Peter and I took a trip to see the locally famous murals of Maxo Vanka, housed in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, PA. The murals, painted between 1937 and 1941, draw inspiration from Eastern European folk art and the consciousness-raising political art of Diego Rivera. They are considered unique for their juxtaposition of anti-war sentiment and religious subject matter. In one mural, Vanka painted the ceiling as a sprawling battle scene, featuring an image of a crucified Christ imposed between two bayonetting soldiers. On another wall is the depiction of a bereaved mother weeping over her son who died in fighting World War I.

Nichole Faina: One could interpret Max Vanka’s murals as a protest against the suffering inflicted by capitalism and war. Do you ever see your own work as being in protest of something?

Peter Trachtenberg: Yeah, not primarily, but it’s certainly a theme. Especially my second book, The Book of Calamities. I think my protest would be lodged not so much in the causes of suffering, which are so myriad, but against the explanations we offer for it—in particular, what I see as the oppressive, victim-blaming explanations. It was one of the reasons why, in the first chapter, I write about the Book of Job. I dwelled on some fundamentalist Christian interpretations, which find incredible ways to blame Job for what happens to him.

NF: When God turns out Job, his friends reject him as well?

PT: Exactly. And there are all these kinds of examples I found online. There are various kinds of Christian Web sites that say he was perfect and blameless, but that doesn’t mean he’s sinless. It is all this hair-splitting to absolve God for what is happening to Job. I equate that with the ways in which unhappy people are blamed for their own unhappiness and their own suffering.

NF: In a previous interview, you said that you’ve courted your own suffering. Can you talk a little about that? Your book isn’t just about avoidable suffering, is it?

PT: In the book, I made a distinction about kinds of suffering, because I am a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Most of the suffering that I experienced in my life fell into the ordinary category. I had my parents die, and if you are lucky enough to live long enough, that will happen to you. But everything else was a direct consequence of my addiction, and I went out looking for it in the sense that I put myself in neighborhoods where I got held up. I did substances that made me physically ill. It’s not that I blame my younger self necessarily; I followed the path I had to follow. The thing was, I came from a fairly privileged, sheltered upbringing. My parents devoted their lives to protecting me. And I sort of half-consciously sought out the greatest possible dangers—so what followed was almost inevitable. And I do distinguish that from say Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up with at least an illusion of safety. Overnight, they found that their safety had been shattered and that the neighbors they had been eating meals with a few days before were suddenly trying to kill them.

NF: With that in mind, what was the seed of your last book, The Book of Calamities?

PT: I had two seeds. I would say one was the death of a friend in 1999 . She was the first person I knew my age that died of something that wasn’t drug or alcohol related. She died of breast cancer. She was somebody whom I had always thought of as extraordinarily good. I had been in love with her when I first knew her. She was somebody who, for various reasons, I thought was untouchable. We had a very good friendship. I responded to her death in the most infantile way. It just seemed incredible and outrageous to me that somebody who’d been that good and was still young had died of this disease. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. And then, in 2001, I was looking at the national response to the 9/11 attacks. Certainly, the shock and horror that people felt was perfectly understandable to me. I felt those things too. But the element that struck me as strange and grotesque was the sense that this was not supposed to happen to us. The story people told was that They—Osama bin Laden, al-Quaeda, Saddam Hussein, the whole Muslim world— hated us for our goodness. To me that suggested an arrogance and willful ignorance of history. It seemed like an American myth that nothing that is bad is supposed to happen to you. Particularly, if you are white and middle class. I do know that, along with that, there is a notion that there are certain classes of people whose suffering is just taken for granted; it’s invisible. And I would say that is mostly made up of people of color and poor people.

NF: As a writer, do you ever take on the job of trying to seek justice for those people whose suffering is believed to be, by some, just consequential to their position in life? What is the role of an artist in social justice?

PT: Well, it’s tough. I believe Sam Goldwyn, the movie executive, said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” When I wrote the book, I was torn between the impulse to send the message and the impulse to make a work of art, or at least good journalism. Really, what I tried to do was tell people’s stories, and to stay, at least for most of the book, out of the mix as much as possible. I used a fairly neutral reportorial prose that’s very different from the prose I used in my first book. I did allow myself some entry into the text when I was writing about Job or Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It was there that I allowed myself to be more a preacher or a lecturer, because I was unpacking texts and looking at what those texts said. So, I was trying to find a balance between those two impulses. I mean, for one thing, if you tell somebody a story with enough attention that allows the subject to speak in their own words, ideally then the reader ends up identifying with that person and identifying with what happened to them. That was the kind of balance that I had to maintain.

NF: As a child of Jewish immigrant parents, what connection do you feel to the immigrants pictured in Vanka’s murals?

PT: It’s very powerful for me. My parents’ experience was very different; they were not imported here as laborers. They were people who really benefitted from the incredible generosity and openness of America. And they came over in the years 1940 and 1941. At that time, Jews were not popular. There were quotas for how many Jews were allowed into the United States. They came here in my father’s case with very little, and they made a living. They weren’t wealthy, but they entered the ranks of the middle class. Just like the children of those people in the Vanka murals, they eventually had really good middle-class lives. There was a window of time in the United States when people who had barely graduated from high school could make a decent honorable living and send their kids to college. That’s gone now. On the one hand, I do not have a strong connection to the people pictured in the murals. I’m not Croatian, I’m not Christian, and I’m not from the working class. But on another level, I completely identify with them. I completely understand the bewilderment and the sense of dislocation that people felt when they came over and found themselves in an incomprehensibly different world.

NF: You were raised Jewish, but on your Facebook page it says that you are a failed Buddhist. How does the word “fail” fit with your Buddhist identity?

PT: Well, I’m a bad Buddhist. I practice. I meditate. I believe in the precepts, but I still want things. I am still often overcome with anger, which is really considered an affliction in Buddhism—so I would say “failed Buddhist” is a really good way to describe me.

NF: Did your spiritual practice influence your writing of The Book of Calamities in any way?

PT: Totally, because in the Judeo-Christian tradition, suffering is considered, particularly in Christianity, the result of a rupture between human beings and God. For example, that’s where death came from. In Buddhism, suffering is just what it is to be human. That’s the first of the four noble truths: Life is suffering. If you really unpack it, it means discomfort, disease, and unease. Buddhism really is a religion or a belief system that’s organized around the study of suffering and the study of ways to be liberated from it.

NF: How does your meditation practice influence your writing? Is writing for you a practice?

PT: It is definitely a practice. Put it this way: I did not want to sit and meditate when I first started doing it. There’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to sit and write. I would rather be watching TV and eating something from a bowl. Or, you know, doing yoga. Although, it’s funny . . . in the last five years, meditation has become pleasurable for me in a way that it wasn’t before. It did a give me the model of doing something regularly, even in the beginning, when there is almost no visible result. I remember when, for me, to sit for three minutes was just a huge effort. And there are days when it is still like that. There are days when it is a huge effort for me to sit at my desk even for an hour.

NF: This idea of dedicated practice is a good segue into talking about your new book. The book’s working title is Another Insane Devotion.

PT: It is a book, on the surface level, that is about the search for a missing cat and in turn about my relationship with that cat and other cats I’ve had. I would say that cats are the first things that I ever loved. Through the cat narrative, I look at a marriage with a woman. I tell this story in a more elliptical way. My real goal is to ask, to examine what loving a cat has in common with loving a human being. What sort of faculties come into play? What obligations arise out of loving?

NF: Tell me about your intentions writing your latest book. Did you first decide what you wanted the overall project to be, or did you first start writing about your love for your cats?

PT: What happened was, in 2008 I was teaching in North Carolina. It was my first full-time teaching job, and my wife was at a residency in Italy. We hired a moron as a cat sitter, the child of friends. Our home was in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. We had four cats, and one cat was my favorite. She’s named Biscuit. At first, our cat sitter would not return my calls. I would have to call him five or six times before I got him. One day he calls and says Biscuit went out a couple days ago and hasn’t come back. I flipped out. Part of what I was probably feeling also had to do with the sense that my marriage was in the process of falling apart—I was sensing some of the first fractures of my marriage. But the main thing I was focused on was Biscuit. I felt like I had to go and look for her, and at the same time that seemed absurd. She’d been gone three days; by the time I got there, it would be five days. I was broke at the time. I couldn’t afford to fly to New York City and then take a train up to the Hudson Valley to go looking for a cat. On the other hand, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t look. I went up there, and maybe I shouldn’t say what the outcome was—that’s what I’m doing in the revisions, I’m leaving the reader in some suspense. The fact was, later I asked myself—what was it that made me look for her? What was that impulse? And I realized it was love. And it made me think about what I felt for Biscuit and what I felt about my wife. What did this have to do with my prior history of love? Looking at myself honestly, I don’t think I really loved another being until I first had a cat in my early thirties. Not that long ago I described what I’m doing in this book; the form I’m working in is called an “ethics.” It’s an ethics of love, like what Aristotle does. It is similar to what Plato does in The Symposium and Phaedo.

NF: In your first book, 7 Tatoos, you also write about romantic relationships and love. That was a classic memoir, was it not? Would you call your current project a memoir?

PT: My current project certainly has elements of memoir, but I’m telling the stories in a much more elliptical way. Part of that strategy was that I want to protect the privacy of the wife character. In the book, she is just known as F. At this point, I think of her as a character. Maybe that’s the only way I can have the liberty to write about her. I have a prefatory note saying this is a work of nonfiction except that it contains, the word I use, an artifact. There is one invented thing. It says in my current draft that the first reader to find out what this thing is will get a prize. The prize will be a kitten. Although, then I realize I’m going to have to vet people to make sure I don’t end up giving a kitten to a psychopath.

NF: We’ve just spent the afternoon viewing these beautiful murals. Do any of the images you’ve seen today particularly speak to the work you are accomplishing in your new book?

PT: I would say that overall what I would relate my work to is the way in which those murals try to translate sacred truth or truths into very plain, fleshy images. You see that the women are strong. They’re not ethereal. They are women with thighs and breasts and shoulders with big arms. And Jesus is not an emaciated swooning Jesus. He’s a big, powerful, muscular figure who’s writhing in great pain on the cross. And I think one of the things I was trying to do throughout the book is to try and translate something that is very big and abstract into things that are very plain and ordinary and very material and fleshy. One of the benefits of writing about a cat is that all of its functions are on display. I have a chapter that begins with a description of a cat cleaning her butt. I write that she does it so avidly that I imagine herself vanishing up into herself. And this becomes a recurring trope. The idea of something disappearing into itself. I relate this to the image of the Cheshire cat, and then, of course, it becomes an image of how a loved person disappears from your life and leaves some aspect of herself behind, the way the Cheshire cat leaves its grin.

A believable narrative voice is an aspect of writing a novel that proves most tricky for new writers. It’s exceedingly difficult to find the voice of who (or what) will narrate your novel and then, having found it, to keep that voice consistent and engrossing throughout many pages. In his first novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, Salvatore Pane has found, and consistently written in, the voice of a memorable narrator: his protagonist, Michael Bishop.

Bishop’s voice – young (age 25), whiny, self-conscious but less self-aware than he thinks – pops off the page. Pane begins his story in the recent past, on the November night in 2008, when President Obama was elected for the first time. At a bar, Bishop encounters his ex-girlfriend, Ivy Chase, “her girl-next-door grin full of dimples and big teeth.” He then recounts the tale of their brief romance as well as the story of their gang of friends who splintered apart around the same time. The extended flashback forms the bulk of the book.

For many Hot Metal Bridge readers, the setting of Pane’s novel will be reason enough to read it, as he’s chosen to usePittsburgh as his milieu. Many local hang-outs are here: the Cathedral of Learning, as the book references Bishop’s transition from a freshman sitting in Seminar in Composition to a grad student teaching it; the freshmen dorms where Bishop and his best friends Sloan and Oz hang out; local bars, including the Library; even the suburban enclave of Dormont, where Ivy and her family live. As a new resident in this area, it was fun to read about places I’ve been getting to know. Pane kept me interested even when the setting was inScranton, Bishop’s hometown, and a place I have only passing familiarity with. The ability to locate the book so strongly in a real environment is one of its strengths.

Less strong is the sense of time. Pane has chosen a very specific era for the events of his book to unfold. Choosing the Mid-Aughts (roughly 2004 – mid-2008) is a great decision, and I enjoyed reading about an era that I can clearly recall. Pane doesn’t shy away from including the myriad ways people communicated during this time, including Facebook, email and Twitter; in fact, a section in which Bishop and his childhood best friend IM each other over AOL was downright nostalgic for me. However, a bit more research would have helped. He has characters watching Hulu and using iPhones in late 2007/early 2008. These products were not ubiquitous then, and it’s doubtful that struggling writers in Pittsburgh could have afforded them. The book is also long, and could have used some trimming. An egregious chapter on Kayne West, completely untied to the rest of the narrative, comes to mind.

My biggest issue with the novel was the protagonist Michael Bishop himself. While his voice is remarkably vivid, it is highly unlikeable, and far overshadows the less carefully wrought characters in the book.. Bishop’s selfishness and self-interest border on the pathological. He is always slightly condescending about everyone else he introduces us to, making his insecurity and unease in the world very clear. Perhaps this is most noticeable when Bishop confronts Ivy over her religion, which she seems to sincerely believe and find comfort in. “Didn’t she know you weren’t supposed to have these conversations past your freshman year of college?” Bishop asks, and then later, he tells her, “’This makes me think a lot less of you…I used to think you were really intelligent.’”

Later, readers do learn a little bit more about Bishop’s specific hostility towards organized religion, the genesis of which is in a childhood trauma that has left him yearning for closure. Also, I’m eager to make it clear that “likeability” is not the only characteristic I look for in a protagonist. Still, with all of that said, Bishop is an extremely off-putting narrator, one that I had a great deal of trouble caring about. Frankly, what he most seems to need is to grow up a bit. Spending the entire book seeing everything only from his narrow perspective, left me feeling that my view was insufficiently broad to appreciate the world Pane created. I felt that I had spent several hours gazing into someone else’s navel.

Last Call in the City of Bridges is the first book from Braddock Avenue Books, a new publishing company located in Pittsburgh. Their slogan, “Uncommon Books, Uncommon Readers” is a winning one, and they’re to be commended, both for beginning a traditional publishing house, and for publishing the work of an unknown, talented writer who’s still learning. The book itself is a lovely object – well-designed, remarkably free from proofreading errors, and incorporating the comic strips and online musings of the protagonist. Here’s to more from both Pane and Braddock Avenue Books!

Shannon Reed is a MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction candidate and TA at the
University of Pittsburgh. She’s written reviews for Publisher’s Weekly
since 2003, and her first book will be published by McGraw-Hill in fall of
2013.