Review of The Muse and the Mechanism

From: PopMatters

"Now enter Josh Davis and Pretendgeniuspress, an independent publishing company along the lines of City Lights and Sylvia Beach's legendary Shakespeare & Company, who gambled by publishing The Muse and The Mechanism in a time when thoughtful, even artful, literature has become increasingly marginalized. In The Muse and The Mechanism, Davis proves an exceptional prose stylist by alternating Hemingway-esque simplicity with Joycean beauty; although his prose manages to rise to great heights, the dichotomy of his simplicity/poetics never lowers itself to artificiality or contrivances, and he somehow, miraculously, avoids slipping into that dreaded state of pretentiousness...

"The Muse and the Mechanism excels at extolling the meandering nature of this generation; we are all rolling forward, often constantly wandering into the unknown, armed only with the hindsight of past failures and embarrassments. Our will to overcome our seemingly inherent lack of motivation vaguely lifts us and propels us forward, and it is that dichotomy -- the desire to do nothing and everything -- that Josh Davis, unlike his contemporaries, who seem to fall short, masterfully displays."