Tag: james mcbride
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store vs Blackouts/The Bee Sting
And the final match-up of the Tournament of Books. I used to think that the judgments and reviews were done in real time, judges in later rounds furiously working their way through the books to be sure they were able and hoping that the book they’d left at the bottom of the stack of potential…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Guest vs The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
So many of the match-ups in this year’s tournament have felt like we were looking at two books dropped in from different universes, in many cases with radically different ideas of what a novel could be. This match-up, on the other hand, is between two books that fit comfortably into high-school me would consider to be…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Blackouts/Dayswork vs Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Semifinal time! I start with my Alternate Reality Where the matchup is between Dayswork and Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. We have an experimental novel against an exemplar of a straightforward narrative, and to be honest, putting these two up against each other, I found I was just in the mood for a straight narrative. Actual reality…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store vs The Lost Journals of Sacajawea
This is the only non first-round match-up where my predictions matched the official judgment so things stay a bit simpler here. Again, we’re faced with two very different books. The Lost Journals of Sacajawea is a deeply challenging book, one that pushes the boundaries of structure and language offering a great deal of unexplained native culture…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store vs Open Throat
Open Throat is structurally similar to Dayswork in that it’s composed of short paragraph-long sections, but the resemblance ends there. The narrative is told from the perspective of a dispossessed mountain lion, inspired by the real-life P-22 (who’s mentioned in the acknowledgments). The story takes a bizarre twist where the mountain lion befriends a young woman…