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Fairleigh Dickinson University

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

A Review of The Rapture Index by Molly Reid

November 18, 2019

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2019) Molly Reid’s The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary is a stunning debut of interlacing short stories that, together, offer a warning about a human society that sees itself as disconnected from the natural world. The … Continued

A Review of Museum of Stones by Lynn Lurie

June 10, 2019

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 2019) In this kaleidoscopic pastiche of a novel, Lynn Lurie creates a world full of grief, confusion, pain, and difficult but enduring love.  The unnamed narrator is the mother of a boy who struggles with many … Continued

A Review of Paris, Etc., edited by Jessie Vail Aufiery

August 13, 2018

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(New Jersey: Serving House Books 2016) Paris, Etc. is an exquisite and elegant collection of poems, stories, and essays has the city of lights as its muse – and for most of the authors, it is a muse they romanticize as … Continued

A Review of See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

December 11, 2017

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) This debut novel from Sarah Schmidt takes as its subject the infamous Borden murders, still theorized and discussed more than a hundred years later, perhaps best known by the nefarious children’s rhyme assuming … Continued

A Review of Guesswork by Martha Cooley

July 17, 2017

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss. New York, NY: Catapult, 2017) “Who can speak for her, for what she feels? One can only guess,” Martha Cooley meditates on a statue of Madonna in Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss, her memoir in … Continued

A Review of Stone Tablets by Wojciech Zukrowski

January 30, 2017

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

Translated from the Polish by Stephanie Kraft (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2016) “Only a man who is suffocating knows what an open window is,” Istvan Terey, a Hungarian poet serving as a diplomat in India, tells his Australian lover Margit … Continued

A Review of Relief Map by Rosalie Knecht

July 11, 2016

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2016) In Rosalie Knecht’s debut novel, seeking relief can be just as dangerous as the problem you’re trying to escape. Set in Lomath, a small Pennsylvania town whose natural geography the author lushly chronicles, this … Continued

A Review of Twelve Women in a Country Called America by Kelly Cherry

November 23, 2015

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2015) The stories in Twelve Women in a Country Called America are as outstanding for their collective wisdom and distinctive voices as for their precise sentences. Cherry is a master of the short story form, but it … Continued

A Review of The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa by Maggie Messitt

July 23, 2015

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

(Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015) Harnessing the power of observation in service of revelation is slow, painstaking work, but its results appear effortless in the best nonfiction. Maggie Messitt achieves this in her elegant first book, The … Continued

A Review of Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

March 19, 2015

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015) How do we survive in a world so hollowed out that it occasionally devours its own? Makina, the protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s borderlands novel, Signs Preceding the End … Continued

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