Previously Reviewed by The Virginia Quarterly Review
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The Best Game Ever: Giants Vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL by Mark Bowden
 [Ed. note: This review covers two books, The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL and A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL].
One of the biggest shifts in American popular culture in the past half century...
How Fiction Works by James Wood
 Books about the art and technique of fiction writing seem to fall into separate and distinct categories. Some are helpful, borderline inspiring, while others -- the ones that equate the art of writing with the art of anything: real estate development, professional football, cooking -- tend to...
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
 In many respects Annie Dillard's book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is so ingratiating that even readers who find themselves in fundamental disagreement with it may take pleasure from it, a good deal of pleasure. Of course confirmed city-dwellers, who want no more of nature than a Sunday stroll in the...
Quipu by Arthur Sze
 In Quipu, Arthur Sze's eighth collection of poetry, the focus on various disciplines -- nature, philosophy, history, science, anthropology -- never seems gimmicky or trite. The focus never forces a metaphor or draws false attention to a topic in order to make new some old poetic trick. Sze's focus...
A Sun Within a Sun: The Power and Elegance of Poetry by Claire Chi-ah Lyu
 If Baudelaire had the popular reach of Dr. Phil, this book would be an instant bestseller, so inspirational is its message, so articulate its conclusions. In evocative prose and far-reaching scholarship, Lyu attempts to distill the astounding, impulsive power of poetry -- its spiritual value, its...
Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew by Samuel Fromartz
 No wonder there now is a fledgling food reform movement calling itself Beyond Organic. After reading Organic, Inc. one begins to understand why some would feel a need to go "Beyond Organic." The current requirements for labeling a good as organic would, theoretically, permit frozen Twinkies at your ...
Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison by Arnold Weinstein
 Weinstein is a passionate and lucid teacher, one of the most graceful expositors
of literature in the nation. In this literary appreciation-cum-memoir, he puts
his gifts to work for an unpopular cause: the continuing relevance of the great
books that "read us," as he claims -- that recover...
When All Is Said and Done by Robert Hill
 Striking and spirited in its presentation, this short, rapid-fire novel reads like a hymn to the travails of love and work, marriage and babies, illness and sex, sexism and the '60s, Revlon and Bergdorf's. Its framework is a Jewish couple in an exclusive New York suburb, but its reach is clearly...
Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
 Gregory Orr's new book is dazzling and timeless. Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for...
All Will Be Well: A Memoir by John McGahern
 Irish novelist and short story writer John McGahern faces a daunting challenge
when writing a memoir: "[It] is impossible to know oneself, since we cannot see
ourselves as we are seen." Further, he acknowledges that "it may be almost as
difficult to understand those close to us, whether that...
Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories
by Cristina Henriquez
Let Me Finish
by Roger Angell
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