IN GOD’S MAILROOM by Kris Willcox

I thought we’d go with the other recruits to Ping Pong, Mahjong, or Sing-Along, but we get Mail Room. Stay here until you work things out, He says, then leaves with the Key. Mother’s not intimidated. Sits down and smooths her skirt. What have we here? Form letters for every person on earth, explaining what happens—not why. Sign on the wall says a few will get their letters while most, poor fools, do not, but even if yours slips behind the mailbox or falls into a flower bed, its contents hold true: You’ll marry that man in the blue suit. Your brother survives the crash, but his right arm doesn’t. Baby for you, you and—yes, I’m serious—you.

A FAMILY by Connor Fieweger

Cain

Somewhere in the suburban-rural divide of New York, a family of four moved into a small house offset from the rest of town next to a set of train tracks. When a freight train came by in the first night, the entire house rattled and woke the father, who took his shotgun that he hid in the garage that morning and went with it outside. He fired a round at the train, and the bullets sparked against the dull, thick side of one of its cars. He loaded another shell, fired it in the same manner, and then watched the freight move on for another twenty or so minutes until it was out of view, passing over the horizon of enervated, dry grass.

ILLUMINATI DANCE by Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski

The Illuminati holds its annual recruitment dance
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in that bar with the antique signs,
And the program includes waltz, disc jockeying, and finger paints,
Because color choice will always weed out the likely rejects.

You know how these things work.

ELECTION NIGHT by Lisa Rowan

I could feel his eyes on me, even though he was watching the road. “That’s private,” my father said quietly. “I don’t tell anyone who I voted for.”

He was fifty and I was on the edge of nineteen, and he was spending his night driving me back to my dorm room three hours from home. I had shown up at his door six hours prior, with almost no notice.

Earlier that day, I had paid $45 for a one-way Amtrak ticket to my tiny Philadelphia suburb. I had walked to my voting center from the train station. I had walked to my father's house after I voted.

COLOR OUT LOUD: Paintings by Chilean Artist Jacqueline Unanue

In spite of living far away, I feel always connected to Chile, a place I refer to as “my ancient land.” Several years ago, the nostalgia for my homeland made me recall the work of two Czech composers, Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, whose music conveys their own love for their country. Dvořák’s New World Symphony and Smetana's My Fatherland became the inspiration for a new series of paintings I began, “My Ancient Land.” The sense of belonging to a place is personal and universal, and this is the reason I could and can very much identify with these musical pieces.

PERSIMMONS by Alec Hill

If she begged her mom, Heather got to spend weekends at her grandma Maxine’s house. Maxine would be sitting in the living room, looking out the front window when she was dropped off. Her mother never came inside. They’d wave at each other through the windows. This was during the oil crisis; her mother told her that shutting off her car and going inside would just waste gas.

TOP HATS AND PUPPETS by Anita Olivia Koester

A lover explains the definition of kerning, I listen to how
the spaces between letters are adjusted for the viewer.

So you can see me, I adjust myself repeatedly in the bathroom mirror.
To sit Shiva one must cover all the mirrors in the house with black cloth.

What if you were to cover me with black cloth, redact me for the day,
would my image remain, giggling like a naughty schoolgirl in the mirror.

MY SHINING DEMON by Jennifer E. Brown

No, you are not my shining demon—
You’re the god Rimbaud wrote of, right? While lambasting the men of his time,
they set us at your feet or you at ours when we were at school, when we thought ourselves gods, in the cold halls, lost, unknown, longing ourselves into flight. I had been to the city of the powers, the city of Père Goriot, and “Our Lady”, but that was no longer in my mind, none of it. I would run off soon; a place was made for me, he was young, his fingers, they hesitated, they curved upwards, I rushed to the street. When I got home I knew I was with child. How could I sleep. My mind was water, the sea.

UNSTEADY ON by David Wolf

Youth felt crooked then and feels crooked now. Not in the way that New York City (once home) is, was, and will remain crooked. In various ways and perhaps none, all depending on our expectations, asinine and understandable all at once. I sought to intensify my views on life as early as I could, as soon as I grew dimly aware of what that meant, jogging into the grey fuzz flying off the newly baseless conceptualizations, concentrating on a decaying tree here, a coarse cluster of beliefs there. Some of my strengths wane, some wax and those are some facts, I guess. These are patient reflections, awaiting sufficient ice to form on the semi-frozen pond of non-narrative, waiting for the body to give way to a story or two. I have encountered/endured many approaches to treating the great textbook themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, life and death, given my line of “work” as a writer and a teacher of literature. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do,” said Voltaire, who used the word sturgeon at least once in his writing to my knowledge and likely stood at a window one morning watching the rain, thinking, I mean who hasn’t?

THE COLOR YELLOW, LOVE, THE FALL OF LEAVES IN AUTUMN by Roy Bentley

Some days in May, a sunrise of redbuds will apron the clouds
and light pour across development lawns gold with dandelions.
My father told me living with others was a matter of knowing
when to weed and when to mow. I don’t know how he woke
without fail at six-ten, Monday through Friday, year after year.
How he got ready for work—showered, shaved—and collected
a prepared-ahead-of-time sack lunch and a Thermos of coffee.
Sleeping in was a poor excuse for working to retire in Florida
where the shirts-on-the-clothesline May air just isn’t the same.
Mother said the light there was numbing, in the Sunshine State,
but she respected my pops whose idea it'd been to move there.
Love was working like he did. Love was keeping his clothes
laundered. Setting that brown-bag lunch where he expected it.
In the Florida town where they lived he said he missed autumn.
The settling-to-earth of leaves. Seeing oaks and maples scrawl
reds and yellows like signatures across the fall sky above lawns,
by the stop sign on Lucky Avenue and State Route 79. He hated
poetry. Called it “useless,” though his world stank of moments
that overfill houses like the scent of coffee brewing the hour
before light clothes you and you set off to weed and mow.

¡THAN CALL BRAD FOR HELP! by John Manuel Arias

¡THAN CALL BRAD FOR HELP!
by John Manuel Arias

to ease the tension
Ammit picks her teeth
with a quetzal feather from your
mother’s hair and politely
asks your name there’s
a pause because no
one’s told you yet but
even if someone had
even if your lovers had
learned how to pronounce
its desperateness
or its delicious
crevices that swallowed
whole whatever was
left for them to swallow
they’d never have
had the balls
to utter it

DANCING DOE AND THE GO-GO-GO by Crystel Sundberg-Yannell

I imagine what brought him to the lot that day was the barrage of ads—the '58 Chevy Camaro had just been released, and even then they could smell it. Classic the scent whispered, heavy with the sour-sweet of rubbed leather and oiled hinges, the soon-to-be-backseat-conception-point of thousands of late baby boomers. Or I imagine it could have been his new job, sorting envelopes by size, weight, and zip-code, the pressed khaki fabric on his elbows rubbing against his father's own—the life-sucking monotony that brings life security also brings a decent credit rating. Or I imagine it was his son's first birthday, family life as a teenage father became instant reality and he was hit with an urgent need to provide—or to escape. Whatever it was, it was something special (I imagine), something that brought him and his wife to that car lot during a breezy Utah summer in '58—switching the lanes of fate from “what could have been” to what had to be.

Eaten by an Ocelot and the Literary Writer Who Reads Trash

Ask June Cleaver

I have a new co-worker in my office. I like her a lot. She fits right into my circle of simpatico colleagues, and we’ve all been having a good time lunching together. Recently we were discussing childhood trauma in literature (I was recommending the Patrick Melrose novels) when she told us that her 8th grade teacher had been eaten by his pet ocelot. I burst out laughing, assuming this was meant to be comic relief, but in fact the story turned out to be true, as I could immediately tell from the expression on her face. I felt terrible, still do, and apologized profusely, but things have never been the same between us, and now our lunching group feels strained. Should I recuse myself and eat cottage cheese at my desk?

A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN KULPA, author of Girls on Film

I had the chance to catch up with fellow Cleaver editor Kathryn Kulpa about her chapbook, Girls on Film. It is just out from Paper Nautilus and was a winner of the press’s Vella Chapbook Contest. An intriguing part of the prize is that the writer receives a hundred copies of the beautifully designed chapbook to distribute as she likes. Kathryn will be selling signed copies through her Etsy shop, BookishGirlGoods, and she’ll also have them available at readings, writing workshops, and other events. Paper Nautilus will also have the book on sale. For more about the Vella Chapbook contest and Paper Nautilus Press, have a look at the press’s website.—M.F.

Ask June: Spill the Beans at the Job Interview and The Case of the Lost Cell Phone

Ask June Cleaver

Last week I went out on errand with my boyfriend. About ten minutes into the drive I realized that I did not have my smartphone. I was afraid that I might've dropped it on the way to the car, and wanted to turn around. He was driving, and told me that not to be silly, that I was always fussing about things like that, that would be a waste of time, and that he was sure it was somewhere in the house. I told him I was not sure at all and that, in fact, I remembered putting it in my purse as we were leaving. He just smiled and promised me that it would be there when we got back. We got back about an hour later, and it was not in the house, or anywhere outside. I think it probably fell out onto the street or sidewalk and someone took it. Even if they hadn’t, it had started to rain and the phone would probably have been ruined.

Ask June: Dog sitting and Facebook woes

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, I am in the middle of a ten-day job as dog-and-house sitter at a posh Manhattan apartment. I sleep at the apartment and play or hang out with Arlo, their standard poodle, every evening. I also walk him…

DISINHERITANCE, poems by John Sibley Williams, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Language is almost intuitively understood as a tool for possession—a form of communication which allow us to hold and deliver ideas between minds. However, John Sibley Williams’s latest poetry collection, Disinheritance, demonstrates how language itself is anything but concrete or possessable. By employing themes of abstraction, fictionalization, and absence, Disinheritance depicts a reality that is only accessible through distortion. Williams’ poems hone in on the moments where language breaks off, proves insufficient, or only serves to describe a situation rather than explain it. In this way, Disinheritance investigates how poetry can both be made out of language and escape it. Like a snake eating itself, Williams’ lines often turn back on themselves, admitting that their bodies are made out of English while also refusing to be limited by the borders of their syllables.

LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY, a young adult novel by Ellen Wittlinger, reviewed by Kristie Gadson

Ellen Wittlinger's Local Girl Swept Away is a gripping story of loss, denial, and deception wrapped up in a page-turning mystery that’s hard to put down. When Lorna is pulled underwater during a storm, her death shakes the community of Providencetown, but no one is more shaken than her best friend Jackie Silva. Lorna was everything Jackie feels she isn’t: untamed, beautiful, brave, and outgoing – not to mention lucky enough to have had Jackie’s crush, their best friend Finn, as her boyfriend. Jackie is the undisputed number two and it's something she has accepted about herself. But, with Lorna gone, life becomes confusing and uncertain. Who is she now?

COSPLAYERS, a graphic narrative by Dash Shaw, reviewed by Helen Chazan

Throughout the pages of Cosplayers, the new book by noted cartoonist Dash Shaw, the narrative presents a series of illustrations of the titular subject: people dressed in costumes based on favorite characters from popular fandom—comics, television, video games, all the things that we like to call “geek culture.” Set against increasingly baroque pop-art patterns, Shaw’s cosplayers will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever perused photos of a comic convention—dynamic figures from popular culture evoked by the mundane reality of fans in uncomfortable outfits under the harsh lighting of the convention floor.

THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and William Sulit Interview Each Other

THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and William Sulit Interview Each Other

For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts.

As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production.

STONER, a novel by John Williams, 50th Anniversary Edition, reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch

This edition of the 1965 novel Stoner arrived with a gold band around the front cover printed with exuberant blurbs that call it “as sweeping, intimate, and mysterious as life itself” and “the most beautiful book in the world.” Such loud praise seems almost at odds with a quiet, serious book; it’s the sort of praise that its hero, William Stoner, neither receives nor (for more than a fleeting moment) desires. Following Stoner from birth to death, the novel presents a seemingly unexceptional life as a subject worthy of the closest examination.

ON THE EDGE, a novel by Rafael Chirbes, reviewed by David Grandouiller

Regarding the difficulty of starting a novel, Umberto Eco writes, in the appendices to The Name of the Rose, “...there is an Indian proverb that goes, 'Sit on the bank of a river and wait; your enemy's corpse will soon float by.' And what if a corpse were to come down the stream–since this possibility is inherent in an intertextual area like a river?”

In On The Edge, Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes, who died last year, activates this idea. His corpse appears in the first pages, in the mud of a lagoon bank, under the feet of a fisherman, in the mouth of a stray dog. The central character and narrator, Esteban, extrapolates from this opening scene, revealing a world of which decaying bodies are the natural product. His world is full of corpses, living and dead, full of ghosts from the past speaking over one another to fill the novel with noise.

A SLEEPLESS MAN SITS UP IN BED, poems by Anthony Seidman reviewed by Johnny Payne

When Oswald de Andrade, in his Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), spoke of “Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality,” he might have been speaking of Anthony Seidman’s delighfully profligate A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed.

The sheer exuberance and sense of endless imagistic invention is exhaustive and vivifying. Each word is a firecracker thrown at your head, as you run through a maze—both mystic and vulgar, blissful and grotesque, enjoying a scary magic that leaves you rapt.

EMOTION IS NOT PLOT: Using Detachment to Create Powerful Fiction, a craft essay by Claire Rudy Foster

Here’s my greatest fear: that I will never be able to name the essential emotions I perceive in myself and others. Our shifting tide and all its smells and sweat and words and secret hidden codes and eyelashes and old letters and emotional ephemera that moves across the surface of the human world like that gyre of discarded belongings and trash that is so large it could cover Texas and is comprised of plastic, the things made of plastic that surround us our whole lives, including baby pacifiers and Barbie dolls and old soccer balls and parts of cars and rubber duckies and condoms and tiny things collected by the swale of the sea the way we will accumulate a hundred precious objects and love them as though they were anything but trash, our collection of special garbage with our memories attached, our stories which burrow deeply into our minds and tell us that there is more to this than plastic, more to this, more.

Kanley Stubrick by Mike Kleine reviewed by Justin Goodman

When you check out the latest novel by Michael Kleine, Kanley Stubrick, on Goodreads, you’ll find that an anonymous reader asked the author if “this book is going to house the Mystery of the 17 Pilot Fish play.” Kleine answered rather grandly, referring to this play set to be released at the end of August, and the rest of his oeuvre: “Kanley Stubrick and The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish are all part of the same universe, yes, but also, so is Mastodon Farm and Arafat Mountain. Everything--the characters, locales, events, situations, demises, dreams--everything is linked.” But Kleine doesn’t address by what means and to what end “everything is linked,” nor if this is a benefit to anyone involved. Kanley Stubrick doesn’t elaborate on it much. Rather, the experimental novel turns out to be a display of the picturesque absurdity of Samuel Beckett and David Lynch without the uncomfortable laughter; Klein borrows sitcom’s episodic format, lack of continuum, and commercial approachability for ends that forcefully lack those very same traits. Such is Kanley Stubrick’s impressive and precarious balance.

A MEAL IN WINTER by Hubert Mingarelli reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

A Meal in Winter by French author Hubert Mingarelli is a subtle book that quietly but methodically stalks the reader’s sympathies. It does so through a beautiful, spare prose style that begins with the first line: “They had rung the iron gong outside, and it was still echoing, at first for real in the courtyard, and then, for a longer time, inside our heads.” This is lovely writing (deftly rendered from the French by translator Sam Taylor, himself a novelist)—yet a bit ominous, like something that can’t be escaped. Later, setting the scene for the winter’s walk that takes up much of the first part of the narrative, he writes: “A pale sun hung in the sky, as distant and useless, it seemed to us, as a coin trapped under thick ice.” Trapped. What is trapped? Or who?

THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON by Kelly Barnhill reviewed by Mandy King

There’s something compelling about orphan stories and Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon draws on this fascination. When I look back at my favorite childhood books, they all have one thing in common—main characters who are orphaned or abandoned. Barnhill’s story opens and immediately draws the reader in with the tragic, forced abandonment of a baby girl in the forest, an annual sacrifice meant to appease the Witch so that the villagers of the Protectorate may live safely for the next year.

This middle grade fantasy is a story with a magical twist. Baby Luna is not completely abandoned because a good witch saves her. In fact, the kind-hearted witch Xan has been saving the babies of the Protectorate every year and taking them to towns across the forest where they are beloved by their new families. These are the Star Children, so called because, on the journey, Xan feeds them magic from the stars. During the journey with baby Luna, two unusual things occur—one, Xan falls in love with Luna and decides to adopt her as her grandchild, and, two, she accidentally feeds the child from the moon and not the stars, infusing her with powerful magic.

Nathaniel Popkin: in Conversation with Translator LEE KLEIN

NP: You’ve traveled to El Salvador, the subject of Revulsion. Did you know about the author Castellanos Moya?

LK: In 1995 I traveled by land from Austin, Texas (where I lived at the time) to Costa Rica and spent about a week in El Salvador en route south. I visited the beach at La Libertad described in the book and experienced San Salvador but I don’t remember seeing any book other than the one I was somewhat inappropriately reading at the time (Cheever’s big red collection of short stories). I hadn’t read Bernhard at that point. I hadn’t even heard of him. But six years later I became exposed to the Bernhard virus and started reading him like mad, hunting down copies (Vintage hadn’t re-issued new editions yet and the University of Chicago editions weren’t so easy to find, not even in NYC; in Iowa City, circa 2002 or ‘03, I found a first-edition hard cover of Gathering Evidence but not a single other Bernhard book in any of the town’s many bookstores, which, at the time, may have excessively disheartened me about humanity, as though I needed Bernhard to raise my spirits during the first G.W. Bush administration).

BRIGHT MAGIC: Stories by Alfred Döblin reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Bright Magic—a powerful concoction of black humor, harsh beauty, and dark fabulism—marks Alfred Döblin’s first collection ever to be translated into English (here by Damion Searls, a master of his craft who’s also translated the works of Proust and Rilke). Döblin (1878–1957), now a classic of German literature, was a pioneer of expressionist writing as well as a respected neurologist and army doctor. His short stories show a tremendous bravery of form and a willingness to experiment with things that today would be called flash and micro fiction as early as the 1910s. He also demonstrates a deep desire to mirror the absurdity of all that surrounded him—the horror of world wars, the destructive power of ignorance—by wielding absurdity in his stories like a joke, a sword, a punishing assumption. In this collection, we see Döblin lift up fascinations with memory and things forgotten, with morality and violence, with descents into madness and those dizzying moments of painful, exquisite clarity.

Ask June: Bereft in Burlington & Wit’s End

Ask June Cleaver

I am a middle-aged woman, currently living alone—my children are both launched, and their father decamped long before they did. Last month my beloved Lab, Vulcan, died suddenly of a heart attack just after his ninth birthday. It was a terrible shock to come home from work and find him lying there, and since then I have not been able to get over either the trauma of that moment or just not having him around. He really was my best friend. We travelled together, went to the park together every evening, ate in the kitchen together, and slept side by side. The house feels empty and a little ominous. I have been thinking about death a lot—not as something I desire, but because my lonely house makes me remember that life is short and scary.

Wit’s End: June Opines on the 2016 Election, continued

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,

Maybe you don’t do politics, but every time I run into someone that I thought had a modicum of sense and they tell me they’re going to vote for Donald Trump, I find that I have no resources except to tell them they are stupid and are not thinking straight. I mean do they really think Donald Trump can deal with ISIS? The issues of the Middle East? Aren’t they terrified as I am even at that remote possibility? Well, I’m not writing you to talk about those that are enthralled by him. I guess stupidity is the norm in America.

I’m writing about my cortisol level that I can’t seem to control when dealing with this subject. (I don’t even want to mention his name again.) Rational discourse on my part seems to fly right out the window. And why can’t people see what I see in Hillary? Her smarts, her determination, her dedication to this country, her experience as a Senator and a Secretary of State?

Should I just crawl under the covers until this election is over, or is there a way for me to have some reasonable conversations about this election?

Cordially,

—At Wit’s End in Wilmington

LOST WORDS, a novel by Nicola Gardini, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

What is experienced and what is retained can be wildly disparate; a revolution is distilled to a single detail, as Nicola Gardini reveals in the lovely novel Lost Words. Gardini explores the cultural and political revolution of 1970s Italy through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy.

Chino—his given name is Luca—is a doorwoman's son in a working-class apartment building on the unfashionable side of Milan. “The doorwoman was not to be away from her post or distracted for a single instant,” Gardini explains. “If something required her to be away from her post, like taking out the trash, then her son should fill in for her and guard the lobby and the front staircase.” The tenants of 15 Via Icaro make Luca's mother miserable; with the mildest touch of bitterness, Luca watches their messy, entitled lives as they trail through the lobby. Like most details of childhood, they are simultaneously fascinating and utterly forgettable—as soon as Luca moves away, he will not think of them again. He is growing up, and Gardini describes his slow inheritance of other people’s nostalgia.

BOILING LAKE, flash fiction by Sharon White, reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

The short flash pieces that comprise Sharon White’s Boiling Lake read like dispatches from a dreamscape—or perhaps a nightmarescape. Surreal, dark, and unmoored from time, these journal entries are well-crafted machines that merge fairytale, myth, and history into concise forms spanning no more than a page and a half. While some of these stories build narrative bridges—recurring characters include a girl nominated for sainthood and New World explorers reporting back to higher-ups—many exist as discrete moments, indulging in provocative imagery without the expectation of elaboration. There is skill in this work that allows one to dwell in the temporary, to savor the fleeting.

BRIGHTFELLOW, a novel by Rikki Ducornet, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

“The linoleum swells with stories. As he plays, darkness rises from the floor and slowly claims the room.” With these unsettling, intriguing first lines, we enter the mind and story of Stub, a six-year-old who observes the broken, embittered adults in his world. Growing up, he’s learning, requires giving up not only childish things but childish wonder, too.

Abandoned by his mother, neglected by his father, briefly cared for by Jenny (a sweet but “crazy, sort of” young woman just sprung from the local “madhouse”), the boy becomes a refugee on the college campus where his father works as a plumber. By nineteen, he’s left home for good and is raising himself there, eating food purloined from faculty houses and wearing “preppy discards” he finds in the student dorms. He spends his days roaming the library stacks and reading the works of the reclusive anthropologist Verner Vanderloon, a Werner Wolf-ish character who writes that mankind is divided into people “who know how to play, are full of mirth and fellow feeling, and the ones who are killjoys and combustible.” Play is a powerful form of magic, Vanderloon says, warning that its suppression leads to catastrophe.

Ask June: Resentful in Rhode Island

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, I am so angry. I live in a comfortable suburb, with old trees and well-kept houses. Most of us make a good living and work hard for our money. Now I find out that my next-door neighbor, a…

Ask June: Baffled in Baltimore

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,

My mother-in-law has never liked me, even though I helped her pampered son grow up for the past 35 years, and produced three reasonably presentable children for him (and grandchildren for her). Last month, Nanny-ma, as my kids call her, went to her eternal reward, no doubt still bitter about the trash that her Sonny decided to marry.

Though I feigned grief for as long as I could, after a couple of weeks, I had had enough. I told Sonny that the fraud had gone on long enough, and that, frankly, I was happy to be rid of the Old Bat. That was a dumb mistake, but as I said to Sonny, she is impervious to real or imagined insults these days, and we should move on with our life....

THE TRANSMIGRATION OF BODIES, a novel by Yuri Herrera, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

There’s something about summer heat that pounds the world into a flat, dusty slab. Your mouth dries out, and your brain loses its moisture and turns to lizardy thoughts instead. Compassion? It’s in short supply. “For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring,” Shakespeare said. Yuri Herrera’s short novel The Transmigration of Bodies is all blood and madness, a noir fantasy set against a hard-baked Mexican landscape.

HOT DOG TASTE TEST, a graphic narrative, by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Matthew Horowitz

Purists beware: this book contains very little analysis and comparison of actual hot dogs. Perhaps best known as the designer of Bojack Horseman, Lisa Hanawalt draws the way children laugh. In Hot Dog Taste Test, she brings haphazard looking outlines to life with vivid watercolors to depict an exploration of sensory staples. Breakfast is moralized, street food is ranked and deconstructed, horses are ridden, otters are swum with, birds are everywhere—some with exaggerated human genitalia, some with understated human anxieties.

RITTENHOUSE WRITERS: Reflections on a Fiction Workshop by James Rahn reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

That desire to be better—to be a better teacher, partner, father, writer—threads through James Rahn’s part-memoir, part-anthology, Rittenhouse Writers, an account of his work to develop and sustain the Rittenhouse Writers’ Group for nearly 28 years. Rahn is the author of Bloodnight, a novel based loosely on his experience growing up in Atlantic City, and his short fiction and articles have been published in many literary magazines. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania for fifteen years and, in addition to leading RWG workshop sessions, maintains a private practice for individual writing and psychoanalytic consultations.

Ask June: Boomer in Millennialville

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, Is there a polite way to let someone much younger in years know that they’re wrong? Especially in a heated political argument, where you want to avoid insulting the person’s lack of historical knowledge and perspective while encouraging…

PEPLUM, a graphic narrative by Blutch, reviewed by Helen Chazan

The French cartoonist Blutch is known for creating beautifully illustrated graphic novels in response to great works of art and literature, and Peplum is one of his finest. The comic is a postmodern refashioning of Petronius’s mid-first century proto-novel The Satyricon, which ditches the original's gluttonous decadence under Nero’s reign in favor of the chaotic end of the Late Roman Republic.

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives. As if preparing an animal for the table, Gee’s poems divide “body” from “life” and “muscle” from “meat.” Divided into two halves, “Separate Blood” and “Bone,” this book reaches out to its reader with both life and decay, fingers extended from the pages to read the pulse of its audience. In what can be understood as taxonomies, eulogies, butchering instructions, and ways to heal a nerve, The Dead in Daylight confronts life and death directly and sharply and softly, a heartbeat edging out from behind every line.

Ask June: Frustrated in Philly

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, My neighbor Alicia was just born to be a pain the butt. First she whined about my lilac tree, which she was sure was going to crash into her house. Since it was planted eight feet from the…

A TYRANNY of PETTICOATS: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers & Other Badass Girls edited by Jessica Spotswood reviewed by Leticia Urieta

Jessica Spotswood has collected fifteen authors, including herself, to contribute short stories that reflect the perspectives of girls across different time periods of American history, starting from 1710 and ending in 1968. The collection spans different regions, cultures, classes and linguistic traditions. As a writer, I can imagine the challenges these authors faced to create this wonderful array of stories, to compress the unique historical and regional circumstances into one young woman’s voice, and fulfill her story arc in just twenty or so pages. Other authors have written four hundred-page historical novels that have had difficulty accomplishing this task. Beyond that, how does a writer avoid explanation that bogs down the reader, keeps the story suspenseful, and leaves the reader feeling satisfied, while avoiding emotionally simplistic endings?

The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis and The Cowshed by Ji Xianlin, two memoirs reviewed by Beth Johnston

Over the years, I’ve consumed dozens of memoirs of hardship. I’ve accumulated shelves full of first-person accounts of war, revolution, genocide, and slavery, and developed a sideline collection of journeys that end in failure or death. These accounts of people swept up in forces far larger than they are comfort me because their problems dwarf everyday concerns like workday traffic or messy kitchen sinks. Their perspective reminds me that much of human history has been dark and difficult, and that in the face of those difficulties, our only choice is whether to act bravely or poorly. These stories also do what good fiction—and good history—do: they let us glimpse the lives of those whose experiences we cannot imagine.

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