Some Thoughts About Greenman’s A Balloon is a Circle and Compass Both:

Just finished up this collection for workshop this week and figured it at least worth a few notes on the web. On the whole Greenman does some pretty fun work here. The Editor of the New Yorker that Greenman is comes through perhaps strongest in his satiric type humor that runs through the stories here. The stories are advertised a love stories and in so much explore the various ways that humans feel love for each other. The majority of book is constructed through the notion of love as a joke. But there are some single pieces that connect to things such as place, power, and music. There is a really interesting web of story connection that is established by the table of contents (one that pairs up stories that are seperated by sizable space) and if read in this alternative order really could much to establish a rather different type of collection.
Much of the individual pieces could be read as allegory with a nice layer of controlling and connected metaphors that open up the possibility for deeper readings. Clearly the table of contents helps to illustrate this particular facet of the collection. It’s a fairly quick read and something that is most likely not going to be Earth-shattering. That said it is on the whole entertaining and could provide something of a nice distraction for the casual reader. Something worth checking out, if only for the piece on Bigfoot.