Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
Speaking with the Angel, Nick Hornby (editor). A collection of all first-person stories by Hot Young Writers™. A few strong stories -- Hornby's "NippleJesus," Giles Smith's "Last Requests," Robert Harris's "PMQ", Zadie Smith's "I'm the Only One" -- salvage the book, but the rest are pretty forgettable.
Amnesia Moon, Jonathan Lethem. Philip K. Dick meets Stephen King's The Gunslinger. As is well-known around these parts, I'm a big Lethem booster, but this was my least favorite of his books so far. I found it a lot less interesting than his very good Gun, With Occassional Music (review), for instance, and all of his science-fiction novels seem vastly inferior to his most excellent Fortress of Solitude (review), his delightful Men and Cartoons (review) and the incredibly fantastic Motherless Brooklyn (review). It's somewhat hard to believe the same guy wrote all five books.