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Spencer Dew

Spencer Dew is the author of the short story collection Songs of Insurgency (Vagabond Press, 2008) and the forthcoming critical study Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker (San Diego State University Press, 2010). Dew is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University, a regular reviewer for Rain Taxi Review of Books, and a Staff Book Reviewer for decomP magazine. His fiction and essays have appeared in scores of publications, including art reviews in Newcity Chicago and Chicago Artists' News. He is currently at work on a book-length study of religious conceptions of writing in the works of Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin.

News / Events

Spencer Dew on sovereign citizen ideology and the religion of Moorish Science.

New reviews: Spencer Dew on Tocqueville in America and Mircea Eliade in Portugal.

Spencer Dew's review of Melissa Broder's When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother.

Two new stories about, of all things, Tennessee hotels. Nashville at THE2ndHAND and Knoxville at Six Sentences.

Spencer Dew on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's hatred of Islam and fetishization of Christianity.

Spencer Dew on the ethical problematic of Jack Kerouac's theology.

Recent reviews: Spencer Dew on Troika Ranch's loopdiver, the work of Jack Smith, new fiction from Helen Oyeyemi, the reception of contemporary Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan, the dramatic trajectory of the Nutcracker, and the problem of racism in the history of American/Haitian relations.

Reviews of Songs of Insurgency

Hipster Book Club: "These three- to ten-page stories are meant to be savored like bitter chocolate."

Tarpaulin Sky: "It's about cliche. And saturation. And how our perceptions as Western readers and intellectuals cannot easily be divorced from the media in which we live."

St Louis Post-Dispatch: "Spencer Dew pounds through the apathy and delusions of our post-9/11 world with the force of a jackhammer.... In their rawness and brevity, the stories send up a flare from the accident scene of our world.... The world is not all right, and these characters aren't going to pretend that it is."

Time Out Chicago: "In his 23 sharp, poignant shorts, Chicago writer Spencer Dew lays out a terrifying post-September 11th world.... His book hits like a sock to the gut..."

Mark Baumer of Everyday Yeah: "I wanted to eat every page after I read it"

Ian Wood at Write Bastard: "Dew has deliberately separated himself from the black and white political orthodoxy which infects so much of the creative class in the post 9-11 American sphere."

David Erlewine at The Short Review: "Spencer Dew's Songs of Insurgency is hysterical and heartbreaking, often brutally dark, rife with unhealthy sex, failures to connect, fetishes, injuries, and death."

Mark Peacock Brush of Wandering Army in The Mile Hive: "The writing is roundly poetic, but never without purpose, and never without some tragic story to tell. Dew writes about human difficulty, and leaves it difficult."

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