★★★★Snoose Boulevard and Points North is a rowdy, opinionated collection of comic stories, mock essays, tavern philosophy, political jabs, and tall-tale folklore. Carlson practically announces the book’s temperament on the first page: “Don’t expect me to apologize for being opinionated. I have earned my opinions.” That’s a fair warning and a useful key to the whole thing. The book isn’t built like a conventional novel. It’s more like spending a long night with a gifted barroom storyteller who keeps changing subjects, circling back to favorite characters, and daring you to keep up.

The Snoose Boulevard pieces give the collection its main pulse. Gwendolyn the Gorgeous Bag Lady, Tokay Red, Little Ernie, Wise Henry the Geek, Reverend Oral Dogoodly, and the rest of the West Bank crowd are treated as comic legends in their own tiny kingdom. Carlson’s humor is crude, elaborate, and weirdly affectionate. He can turn a garbage-strewn alley, a jug of wine, or a ridiculous neighborhood feud into a kind of mock-epic event, and that’s where the book is often at its best.

The essay-like chapters are just as central as the stories. Pieces on morality, pornography, smoking, guns, politics, and cultural taste give the book its “outrageous opinions” half, and they read like arguments meant to provoke laughter before agreement. Carlson likes pushing an idea past politeness and into absurdity, but the engine underneath is usually a defense of free speech, personal liberty, skepticism, and the right to be difficult in public. You don’t have to agree with every position to feel the pleasure he takes in the argument itself.

The “Points North” side broadens the book into Minnesota logging-town folklore, most memorably in longer pieces like Damnation, Kokesh, and Peggy’s Lament. These sections keep the same taste for exaggeration and bawdy comedy, but they also add a rough ballad quality. By the time the book reaches its afterthought on language, it’s clear that Carlson’s real loyalty is to words, talk, names, jokes, insults, songs, and stories. As he puts it, “Words are the currency of conversation,” and the whole book spends that currency freely.

Snoose Boulevard and Points North is a fun book about characters who live by appetite, argument, memory, and sheer comic nerve. It’s not trying to be smooth or tasteful. It’s trying to sound alive, and most of the time it does. The collection works because Carlson treats outrageousness not as decoration, but as a way of seeing people at full volume.

— Thomas Anderson, Editor In Chief, Literary Titan

★★★★★ Snoose Boulevard and Points North: Provocative Stories and Outrageous Opinions is a collection of short stories and essays by Earl. L. Carlson. Many of these stories are set primarily in the Minneapolis West Bank. Three homeless friends living under the Washington Avenue Bridge have the night of their lives when one of them wins a case of wine. A reverend wants to preach the word of the Lord to a lovely bag lady, but she would rather throw empty beer bottles at him. When the government sends its agents to capture bag ladies to control the growing homeless population, Gwendolyn the Gorgeous strikes back at her wannabe abductors. The president assigns the ruthless Lieutenant himself to catch the elusive Gwendolyn and curb the homeless population in Minneapolis, but things don't go according to plan.

I'm always entertained by Earl L. Carlson's works, and his latest book, Snoose Boulevard and Points North, doesn't break the trend. The stories are full of humor and irony, while the essays are thought-provoking and will make readers ponder. Carlson's satire is on point. His witty phrasing made me laugh throughout the book, but there's also an underlying layer of social commentary that I found really poignant. The characters are colorful and lively. Despite the situations they find themselves in, they strive to enjoy life to the fullest and often resort to uniquely creative ways to find solutions to their problems. Gwendolyn the Gorgeous is a character I won't forget for a very long time. Carlson also has a lot to say in his essays, especially in relation to politics and society. Overall, it's an entertaining collection. Highly recommended.

— Pikasho Deka, Readers’ Favorite Editorial Review

★★★★★ Earl L. Carlson’s Snoose Boulevard and Points North is a collection of original short stories and his own musings, all compiled into one wonderful volume. Among them are pieces like Springtime on Snoose Boulevard, where April exposes Snoose Boulevard’s buried winter mess as the city thaws, showing renewal that's linked to what people leave behind. No Smoking is the defiant words of a proud smoker tired of public scolding, arguing that adult choice still matters even when others try wearing a mask of virtue. In Peggy’s Lament, Peggy Mattice’s imagined past is shaped into a bawdy folk song about love, pride, and survival in a boomtown, where reputation never tells the whole story. On the Second Amendment tests a familiar constitutional claim by asking how far its language can stretch.

Earl L. Carlson’s Snoose Boulevard and Points North is first-rate fiction and essays, and Carlson writes in a voice that is sharp, original, and unmistakably his. This body of work is presented in an intelligent and wholly entertaining style, with Carlson taking ordinary irritation, alongside some pretty serious topics, and serving them up in accessible, bite-sized reads. Given that my first ever car was a 1987 Nissan Sentra in “Sienna Brown Metallic,” my favorite story is, inevitably, Turd Brown Cars. Carlson takes the simple question of why anyone would choose that car color—which my parents really did, as they bought it brand new years before it became mine—and turns it into a comic portrait of taste under public scrutiny. The icing on the turd cake is Carlson's dead-serious certainty and a tone that sounds like it came after years of study. Readers who enjoy excellent storytelling and essays will adore this collection. Very highly recommended.

— Jamie Michele, Readers Favorite Editorial Review

★★★★★ Snoose Boulevard and Points North by Earl L Carlson is an eclectic mix of stories, anecdotes, and opinion pieces that generally focus on an unusual assortment of what many might call the “dregs of society” – skid-row bums, hobos, bag-ladies, and musicians. Set mainly in the seedy Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, the collection shows the human side of those who, through circumstances or choice, find themselves living rough at the very edges of society. Readers will absolutely come to admire, love, and root for these souls trying to survive in the freezing depths of a Minnesota winter. The mixture of stories is as varied as the characters involved, and this gives it such a vibrant sense of variety.

Snoose Boulevard and Points North is the second book I have read by author Earl L Carlson. I truly appreciated his ability to give some humanity to those on the margins of society and to remind us what it is to be human, to have compassion, and to share community with others wherever that community may be. All these stories had a special flair or comic touch, but a couple in particular resonated with my personal mindset. I particularly enjoyed the tale of Anthony Kokesh, whom the author dubbed the greatest writer of our generation. Of course, this is not a person that anyone else would have heard of, but the tale of why he received that sobriquet from the author is quirky, amusing, and delightful. The other story that really captured my attention was titled Freedoms: The Care and Feeding of. This story was, I suspect, an opportunity for the author to express his personal feelings about the institutions that underwrite the basic freedoms that we are granted under the Constitution. As he so rightly points out, although people demand the right to freedom of speech, to express their own opinions, they tend not to believe they should extend that right to those who might disagree with their opinions. This eclectic mix of stories and opinion commentaries makes this book such an enjoyable read. I am thrilled to have found another author I can follow, and I highly recommend this book.

— Grant Leishman, Readers' Favorite Editorial Review

★★★★★ Earl L Carlson’s Snoose Boulevard and Points North includes stories about a Minneapolis West Bank neighborhood, with northern Minnesota’s Blackwater and Bobcat Crossing serving as rougher outposts of the same raucous comic universe. In the city, Gwendolyn the Gorgeous Bag Lady rules the alley behind Big Alice’s Fine Wines and Burgers, where Reverend Oral Dogoodly’s piety becomes a target, and her shopping cart kingdom has its own defense system. At the Cardboard Box Hotel under the Washington Avenue Bridge, Tokay Red’s spring robin wager turns a private cash jackpot into a communal wine party. The northern stories extend that same habit into logging-town life, where local rumor trumps courthouse record. Carlson also interrupts the fiction with editorial bursts, so the collection feels like a neighborhood gazette run by someone who knows every regular’s grievance extremely well.

Earl L Carlson’s Snoose Boulevard and Points North is wonderfully rowdy comic fiction with the voice of a barroom philosopher who can turn a childhood hiding place into mythology. Carlson is especially good in Adventures in a Skinner Box, where five-year-old Einar’s flight from Knute changes the woods behind the house into a realm ruled by a boy’s fearful imagination. That gift for enlarging small incidents also brightens Malicious Mischief, as Deputy Holsman’s cleanup punishment becomes a ritual shaped by farm kids who discover laughter inside public embarrassment. Carlson ties the humor to places so tightly that even a privy path can become folklore inside his comic geography. His best work here makes Snoose Boulevard and Points North feel like local legends recorded by the one person awake enough to catch every absurd confession in every tavern shadow.

— Asher Syed for Readers’ Favorite

★★★★★ In Snoose Boulevard and Points North by Earl L Carlson, the author has taken the world of the forgotten, the homeless, and the bag people of the country and written short stories about their lives, with glimpses into how they came to live along Snoose Boulevard. The characters portrayed live in Minneapolis, in an area called Snoose Boulevard, beneath the highway on ground the council has forgotten about. That is where the homeless of the city congregate and find help, and a place to sleep, knowing that those around you will look after you with no thought of repayment, just friendship and someone to have your back from time to time.

In Snoose Boulevard and Points North by Earl L Carlson, there are 29 stories in all, some long and some short, but each with a profound message about these forgotten people of the world. The main characters are Tokay Red, Little Ernie, Wise Henry the Greek, Gwendolyn the Gorgeous Bag Lady, Reverend Oral Dogoodly, and many more who wander through different stories. Their favourite place to visit is Big Alice’s Fine Wines and Burgers, where in a back room they can congregate for food and just to be. The author makes the reader realize that most of these people are there because they have suffered a trauma of some kind or another, but never received the proper care or medical help that they should have. Each story shows the reader that those same people we turn our backs on are human beings with feelings, worries, and problems just like the rest of us; they just never had a family or friends in their lives who would help them deal with what was wrong. It is a book that the reader will pick up again from time to time, and hope that they will eventually manage to get the help they needed. It will make the reader think hard about life, and this makes it well worth more than one read.

— Bernadette Longu, Readers’ Favorite Editorial Review