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Review: 'This is Between Us' by Kevin Sampsell

3/4/2014

Reviewed by Anna Stusser

This is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell is an articulate and deliciously written novel which maps a relationship over the span of five years. Sampsell’s narrator addresses every tiny adorable anecdote with “you” as if the whole book is one long love letter. This creates an intimate relationship between reader and story; I felt included in all of the action, mishaps and triumphs.

The book dissects several misconceptions regarding long-term relationships. Myth number 1: When you have kids, you can no longer go out and have fun. Throughout the novel, the narrator goes out to bars with and without his partner without sacrificing time with his children. His son, Vince, and his stepdaughter, Maxine, go on tons of adventures with the narrator: bike rides, visits to the pumpkin patch … they even play robots with a ridiculous amount of tin foil. The kids are never seen as ‘burdens’ or obstacles that prevent the narrator and his partner from having a good time. The narrator’s children invite intimacy rather than standing in its way.

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Review: 'The Right-hand Shore' by Christopher Tilghman

1/2/2014

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Reviewed by Joe Kovacs

The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman

Mason is about as innocuous a surname as one can imagine. It’s not Usher or Compson which, drawn from the world of literature, call to mind cursed families where madness, cruelty, scandal and a fallible family bloodline result in dysfunction and destruction. But in the powerful yet tragic novel, The Right-hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman, it is the Mason family which has resided for hundreds of years on an estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that collapses time and again beneath the weight of history, slavery and race relations, and the foibles of human ambition.

I met the author a few months ago at the James River Writers Conference in Richmond where he was honored as a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s annual literary award in fiction. Over lunch, we fell into conversation about Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Mason’s Retreat—the infamous estate in Tilghman’s novel—is loosely based on his own family home. As a resident of Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC, I have many times driven eastward down arrow-straight Route 50 to and through Annapolis, over the Bay Bridge and to the coast to spend long, relaxing weekends. Following my conversation with Tilghman, I reviewed a map of the Eastern Shore and noticed a Tilghman Creek branching off the Chester River. Still at the Richmond event, I did what any honorable writer’s conference attendee would do to support the community and purchased a book from an attending author. My decision, of course, was Tilghman’s The Right-Hand Shore.

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Inscriptions for Headstones by Matthew Vollmer

11/18/2012

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In Inscriptions for Headstones, published by Outpost19, Matthew Vollmer (author of Future Missionaries of America and co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts) establishes himself as a master of the long sentence in his artfully done exercise in memory. Each of these 30 short, autobiographical essays is written as a single sentence to be inscribed on the deceased’s headstone – stringing together delightful, hilarious, life-affirming moments which round out a picture of a boy who was a boy and then a man and then a husband and a father – a man who beheaded copperheads as a child, considered undergoing surgery to correct an abnormal chest cavity, who searched the internet for a long-lost Michael Jordan-like friend from his childhood, who cut his son’s hair after learning to cut his own, who vacuums a horde of invading ladybugs, tells children campfire stories about a man who scoops out eyeballs with a spoon, is taught to follow the absolute truth and power of G-d as a child and hundreds of other minor, critical moments which define the deceased as a man like so many of us – a man with limited time and an unexpected and strangely important legacy.

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Review: 'This is Between Us' by Kevin Sampsell

Review: 'The Right-hand Shore' by Christopher Tilghman

Inscriptions for Headstones by Matthew Vollmer

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