[…] unreality TV shows earn more by gobbling insects than Mark Twain ever banked, we need talented novelists to explore the less affluent ZIP codes of America. First-timer Joseph Coulson does the job so well he is already being compared to James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy) and other skilled chroniclers of working-class life. […]

  The endless possibilities for employment and prosperity after World War I slowly begin to crumble in the Great Depression. Indeed, symbolically and potently, Joseph Coulson describes the summer of 1931 as the “season of dying trees.” Stephen and Phil Tollman heroically but ineffectively attempt to prevent the disintegration of their family in the […]

  Joseph Coulson’s second novel, Of Song and Water, concerns a jazz musician coming to endings: a career on the skids because of hands that can no longer make the chords he needs; a boat, falling apart and weighted with memories of his father, and of his father’s father before him (both men casting long […]

  I’m currently reading Of Song and Water by Joseph Coulson (Archipelago Books) for a review. It’s a nice shift for me — I’d read a few of the magical realism-type books in a row, and being completely enamored with that type of story, a break is a good idea, lest I burn myself out. About […]

  Music can evoke powerful sense memories of people, places, and times. In Joseph Coulson’s novel Of Song and Water, music and issues of memory, identity, and family are intimately tied together in the story of onetime jazz guitarist Coleman Moore.   There is a sizeable canon of jazz fiction, but Water is distinct for its use […]

[…] live in the city where my brother and I grew up, where we made our choices, and choices were made for us,” laments the no-longer-young narrator of Joseph Coulson’s first novel “The Vanishing Moon,” which will be published next month by New York City-based Archipelago Books. “I go to the old places to make […]