if you really want to write the great american poem, you have to realize that Redbox killed Blockbuster, not Netflix

Just a quickie to say thanks for some new LLF reviews: In the Emprise Review, Nathan Huffstutter has an insightful, evenhanded, and well-written look at the book. He also seems fairly familiar with the territory of the stories, as he says of I-5: "In this corridor, Red Bluff to Yreka to Talent, the weeds and speed give way to off-ramp drags of greasy spoons and grizzled beards, canned greens and un-ironic curios, potholes and slush." I can't even feel annoyed at his criticism of a few stories because he understands them so well and so eloquently. Kudos, Huffstutter! Which I've italicized because it sounds the title of a TV pilot Saul Bellow might've written in the bathtub during a fever, but here is Nathan Huffstutter saying eloquent things:

Make no mistake, this isn’t participation-ribbon or up-by-your-bootstraps trying; in these dozen stories, Young exposes character after character who are trying to trust. Trusting themselves, trusting adulthood, trusting the internet, trusting the people they just might love, all while suspecting the very suckiest, that with both sides predisposed to fuck things up, maybe the best they can do is try. These are the same twitching, fragile moments Jim Shepard engulfs in avalanche and flood and Young dares them au natural, in high school gyms and tribal casinos and Pollard Flats. And if you’ve never stopped for the restroom in Pollard Flats, let me be the first to tell you, that mannequin in the tub will haunt you way longer than any old rockslide.

Also in the eloquence department, Kimberly Ann Southwick has a review of LLF in the new Gigantic Sequins, wherein she says "Young's characters are hunter-gatherers of the fiction world, trading any normal identification of themselves or their possessions for something both more interesting to us and more useful to them." Sweet. Also she says some of the people in the book have green hearts, which is a smart thing to say. The whole issue of GS is full of poems, stories, and illustrations of naked ladies with dinosaur heads. Some of my favorite lines from the issue include Leigh Phillips's "You stole my song / by dying into it," James Caroline's "We were 14 when I tried to give him my winter coat," Adam Atkinson's "Months pass. Mongolians pass," and Michelle Cheever's "We ate our pancakes on opposite sides of the room."

In tennis news, Tsonga the butterfly defeated Federer the napper. A major upset in this riding lawnmower of a summer.