A GLASS ROSE (308 pp.)Richard BankowskyRandom House ($3.75).
The present seems to be deadened by the drone of Hail Marys and weighted by the sweet stench of stale funeral flowers banked around a seven-day-old corpse. The past, for the mourning family of Stanislaw Machek, is a terrain of lust and violence, seen dimly through the murk of love, greed, self-righteousness and madness. In a brilliantly constructed first novel, Author Richard Bankowsky, 29, leads the mourners at Machek's wake, one by one, back across that dark landscape.
Set down in the middle of it without bearings,...
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