ROUND-UP April 24-May 1, 2018

Hello readers! For this round-up, I have an interview with Bryan Camp about his debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes, a review of Netflix's Seeing Allred, and a review (also in print) of a recent show at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Enjoy!

• "'The City of Lost Fortunes' and How Writing Goes from the "Goo in a Cocoon" Stage to a Fully-Realized Tale." PopMatters, April 24, 2018.

"There's more to Bryan Camp's charismatic debut than an entertaining urban fantasy yarn: the specter of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina hangs over the narrative with heavy, painful purpose, ultimately imbuing Jude's story with a sharp poignancy. While the monsters and magic in The City of Lost Fortunes are hiding just out of view, the imbalance of society's scales are all too real. I caught up with Camp over email, and picked his brain about developing the story, the relationship between luck and fate, and who would play the characters in a Hollywood adaption."

• "'Seeing Allred' Celebrates Feminist Lawyer Gloria Allred's Controversial Career." BUST Magazine, May 1, 2018.

"Yet in the bits of 1980s and 1990s footage shown in Seeing Allred, her presentation is different from the Gloria Allred you see on television or in recent news: she’s sharper, more direct in challenging her verbal sparring partners, her frustration with the misogynistic comments thrown her way less veiled; her closely-cropped hair and wide-collared suits are a marked turn away from the more composed, almost professorial attitude she projects in her more recent press conferences. Perhaps it’s the benefit of having won enough cases, and establishing that she’s not going anywhere, that lends her the confidence to calm in the face of occasional screaming vitriol. Perhaps it’s a more calculated, almost resigned side effect of having been a media fixture for so long that she knows no one wants to listen to an angry woman on television. The sharpness is still there, but it’s been sanded down considerably."

• "David Hartt at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia." Artillery Magazine, May 1, 2018.

"The shells of pay phones included in the show proper also hone in on the relic aspect, albeit in a much more straightforward way. As Fukuyama discusses the disintegration of the welfare state, and how the white working class has felt left behind by increasing globalization, Hartt’s inclusion of a defunct pay phone provides a literal illustration of concern for the public good as a relic."