July Read of the Month: “Blueberry Years,” by Jim Minnick

Jim Minnick’s The Blueberry Years, re-released in paperback a few weeks ago, proclaims itself, in the subtitle, as being a “memoir of farm and family.”  And so it is.  Yet, while Minnick is too humble to proclaim it as such, it is the reader’s prerogative to make of a book what it really and truly […]

“Fielder’s Choice,” by J. Mark Hart

Review by Matthew Simmons Years ago, after reading Richard Russo’s Mohawk, I decided I needed more flexibility in labeling fiction.  Obviously, there was pulp, there was genre fiction, and there was the rarified air of “lit-tra-ture.”  But what I’d found in Mohawk seemed to somehow occupy parts of all of those labels simultaneously and effortlessly.  […]