Spencer Dew
Chicago-based writer and critic Spencer Dew is the author of Songs of Insurgency. His fiction and essays have appeared in scores of publications. Dew is also a regular reviewer for Rain Taxi Review of Books and contributes art reviews to Newcity Chicago and Chicago Artists' News.
News / Events
New review: Spencer Dew on Joseph Young's Easter Rabbit at Trick with a Knife.
Recent Spencer Dew reviews on Reviews of Troy Richards and Elizabeth Shreve, Jack Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Tariq Ramadan, and the Nutcracker. Spencer Dew on Pat Robertson, Haitian history, and America's true devil, here.
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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Interviews
Interview with Amy Guth on Chicago Now
Interview with Ben Tanzer on This Blog Will Change Your Life
Interview with The Short Review
Interview with Mark Baumer of Everyday Yeah
Interview with Aleathia Drehmer on Guild of Outsider Writers
Interview with Ragad's Nick Ostdick
Spencer Dew's "Book Note" essay on Largehearted Boy
Interview with What to Wear During an Orange Alert
Interview with SmokeLong Quarterly
