BOOK REVIEWS

Cleaver reviewers present the most exciting literary work from around the globe. We specialize in reviewing books from American independent presses and works in translation.

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STARKWEATHER: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America, nonfiction by Harry N. MacLean, reviewed by Anna Llewellyn
A Nonfiction Book by Harry N. MacLean, reviewed by Anna LlewellynSTARKWEATHER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE KILLING SPREE THAT CHANGED AMERICA (Counterpoint Press) The stranger asks no greater glory till life is through than to spend one last minute in wilderness. —Charles Starkweather, in a poem for his mother Nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather was “the first modern-day mass killer,” the first American murderer motivated by “the sheer psychopathic thrill of it,” according to true crime author Harry N. MacLean. A surprising claim, given how few know of the Starkweather case. Though Charles’s 1958 killing spree through Nebraska and Wyoming inspired various works like Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Charles is not deemed biographically binge-worthy by the streaming powers-that-be unlike his peers Dahmer, Bundy, or fellow spree-killer Andrew Cunanan. In a time when true crime stories are more accessible than ever, could it be possible for the founding father of modern murder to fly so successfully under the radar just sixty-five years after his groundbreaking crimes? MacLean certainly thinks so. What sets MacLean’s newest book Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America apart from other books in the inundated true crime ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
THE MEMORY OF ANIMALS, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Coralie Loon
A Novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Coralie LoonTHE MEMORY OF ANIMALS (Tin House Books) We’re all familiar with the sense of exhaustion and collective grief that seeped into our bones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the pandemic is still not over, we have been able to recover and continue with gratitude for the things that went right: a successful vaccine campaign, virtual attempts to connect to one another, and eventually, a return to normalcy. Once the metaphorical gates opened, I swore I would never consume another piece of fiction that had anything to do with a deadly pandemic. I broke this promise for Claire Fuller’s 2023 novel, The Memory of Animals, and I’m glad I did. The Memory of Animals is novelist and short fiction writer Claire Fuller’s fifth book, and another dive into the themes of isolation, crisis, and memory, which she also explores in Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) and Unsettled Ground (2021). In The Memory of Animals, the fictitious epidemic Fuller imagines doesn’t give much grace to the inhabitants of its world. The disease, nicknamed “dropsy,” is apocalyptic, wiping out almost everyone in the world save for the main characters. The novel is narrated by ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
CALL UP THE WATERS, Stories by Amber Caron, reviewed by Char Dreyer
A Short Story Collection by Amber Caron, reviewed by Char DreyerCALL UP THE WATERS (Milkweed Editions) “You’re gonna wanna find the biggest branch you can and make a lot of noise as you run.” This was the only terse instruction I received from Jill, the sheep farmer I would spend the next two weeks shadowing, before she flung open the gate to the pasture and thirty ewes and lambs rushed bleating towards me. It was my job to corral them uphill from the pasture to the barn for the evening, along a winding dirt path, through the forest and fading light.  Jill, who was nearing sixty with a bad shoulder and a worse knee, couldn’t run this hill anymore --though she was still strong as a ram. As I read Call Up the Waters, Amber Caron’s debut short story collection from Milkweed Editions, I was reminded of Jill often in the characters I encountered. Throughout ten stories, women work the land and are consequently shaped by the rocks, water, sun or snow that face them. Generally, they are not the warmest of women –they lack stereotypical “soft” femininity and instead are flush with raw, stoic humanity. Jill was one of ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
STRANGE ATTRACTORS: THE EPHREM STORIES, by Janice Deal, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
A Short Story Collection by Janice Deal, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss CampbellSTRANGE ATTRACTORS: THE EPHREM STORIES (New Door Books) Janice Deal has said of her earlier award-winning fiction that place is often her muse. Now in Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories, that muse—that place—is the fictional town of Ephrem, Illinois. The town itself becomes a composite multi-voiced character. For everyone in town, whether native, new arrival, or transient stranger, loneliness is a unifying affliction, a theme introduced in “This One Is Okay,” the outstanding first story in the collection. In “This One Is Okay,” lifelong Ephrem denizen Looie, seven months a widow, is not sure of “the statute of limitations on grief.” Looie is a reader; her books are companions. A prize possession, a compact edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, purchased at a yard sale for the extravagant sum of fifty dollars (missing its magnifying glass) sits on the shelf beside her childhood dictionary. Deal writes, “She looks at the works…and she imagines them as friends.” She uses her late husband’s old magnifying glass to read the OED, but “sometimes it’s enough to think of the world of words inside.” Looie welcomes and feeds a squirrel who “wormed down ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
A Novel by Max Porter, reviewed by Alex BehmSHY (Graywolf Press) Max Porter, previously nominated for the Man Booker Prize among other awards, has just published a fourth novel, Shy. The title character, Shy, is an adolescent enrolled at Last Chance, a live-in program for troubled youths outside of London. When I read about Shy in Max Porter’s new novel, I found a strange intimacy with this character, someone trying to navigate the world without any idea of how to do such a thing. To highlight the turbulence of youth, Shy’s story is told not in a traditional narrative, but through rich textual variety where literary devices are not only tools to enrich the language, but are inherent to the structure of the book itself. Porter uses rhyme and rhythm in a highly stylized way that mimics the inconsistent feelings of youth; his words sing. The sentences spindle and unfurl like lines of verse and incomprehensible voices come to life on the page. In the novel, words and the way they take up space often mimic Shy’s emotional state. “His thoughts are looping along in odd repetitive chunks, running at him, stumbling. Feels brave, feels pathetic, feels nothing. Panic. Calm ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
Two Takes on LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO, stories by Cleo Qian: Lillian Lowenthal and Audrey Lai
One New Book, Two ReviewsLET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GOby Cleo QianTin House Books, 246 pages Cleaver's internship program offers the opportunity to review a new book from a small or indie press under the mentorship of a senior editor. We loved how this summer, Lillian and Audrey were both jazzed about Cleo Qian's new collection from Tin House, LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO. Read below for two smart takes on one smart book: LILLIAN Lillian Lowenthal is a recent graduate of Vassar College, where she majored in Creative Writing and minored in Asian Studies. Lillian currently lives in Baltimore and is working to complete the first draft of a novel. In her free time, she swims, rides horses, and is teaching herself to sew. Mentor: Moirah Hampton Growing up half Chinese, I thought myself lucky for having double eyelids. Possession of this Western feature was a benchmark of my identity until I decided to wear winged eyeliner in ninth grade. After drawing a few shaky lines across my eyelids, I stepped back to observe my handiwork in the mirror. I was perturbed to see that the makeup I drew had virtually disappeared. How was this possible? I tilted ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
SCENE OF THE CRIME, a novel by Patrick Modianom, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner
SCENE OF THE CRIME by Patrick Modiano translated by Mark Polizzotti Yale University Press, 157 pages reviewed by Jeanne Bonner I write down all kinds of little snippets of thought because otherwise they will float away. For example, one day in the small notebook I keep in my car, I scrawled, “I think I am losing my fingerprints.” Sometimes I write as if in a trance. I must—otherwise it’s difficult to explain this command that I recorded one day: “Map my brain.” You could say it’s a call for a decoder ring of sorts, or simply my secret instructions to an artist I have yet to find, one who can draw the ideas that paper the walls of my mind. Someone who can decipher the permanent mosaic of thoughts, from the moment as a child that I poured the bottle of Prell shampoo on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and my father swooped down to administer my punishment, to certain lines from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life (“How would you like living in the nicest house in town?”), plus the insistent rhythm of that French song partially sung in Spanish with a looping melody that’s about an endless journey, and ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
RIGHT THIS WAY, novel by Miriam N. Kotzin, reviewed by Lynn Levin
RIGHT THIS WAY by Miriam N. Kotzin Spuyten Duyvil, 339 pages reviewed by Lynn Levin They say it can be done, but it is hard, very hard, for most betrayed wives to regain trust and forge ahead in a marriage with a husband who has cheated. This may hold true even if the man has ended the affair, even if he feels remorse, even if he is not a repeat offender, even if he tries to repair the marital bond. Warranted or not, suspicion, like a persistent shadow, may stalk a woman’s thoughts. She may not be able to rid herself of the notion that somewhere out there the enticing forbidden fruit still dangles or ripens anew. The concept of transgression without redemption goes all the way back to the myth of Adam and Eve. Miriam N. Kotzin, in this wise and heart-wrenching new novel, reimagines the foundational Genesis text and adapts it to our times. The author situates the action in early twenty-first-century Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a comfortable middle-class town in which people have steady jobs, play tennis, eat healthy, go for manicures, have social lives with friends, care very much about their homes, and where, sorry to ... Read the full review
TETHER AND FLOAT: THOUGHTS ON TWO NEW ESSAY COLLECTIONS by Beth Kephart SOUVENIRS FROM PARADISE Erin Langner Zone 3 Press HALFWAY FROM HOME Sarah Fawn Montgomery Split/Lip Press What would happen if, when we thought about essays (the power they might wield, the indignities they suffer), we thought about tether and float? The ways in which the essay knits itself into its own grounding facts, on the one hand. The ways in which it transcends them, on the other. Essays erupt from the lives that we live. Our hopes, which surge and thin. Our grief, which stills and screams. Our joy, which can’t be fixed. Our desire, which we understand until it makes no sense to us, until we don’t make sense to us, until we write the essay to find out, or read the essay hoping to find both the shimmer of the world and the maybe of ourselves. The math of an essay is not plot times words, not questions equals answers, not A plus B sums out at C. The math of an essay is disclosure and search, supposition and erasure, reassertion and pause. What happened is the essay’s tether. Why it mattered, or what it means, ... Read the full review
HERmione, a novel by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), reviewd by Aalia Jagwani
HERmione by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) New Directions, 288 pages reviewed by Aalia Jagwani When I started reading HERmione, I knew nothing about Hilda Doolittle, the American modernist poet better known as H.D. But although intensely personal and grounded in an endlessly fascinating life, HERmione’s slow unravelling of H.D.’s psychology is arguably all the more enticing in when approached unknowingly. Reading HERmione did not feel effortless—this is not a book that propels you forward. It instead holds you back, grappling in the realm of ambiguity that the protagonist inhabits. It is an exercise in restraint — from tending instinctively toward the straightforward, from attempting to categorize people and relationships that resist boundaries. Reading it felt like playing a game with myself — to piece together HER consciousness, I had to allow my own to dissolve. It is precisely this dissolution of the self that H.D. details in HERmione. She adopts an alter-ego, Hermione or “Her” Gart, who is in her early twenties, having just dropped out of Bryn Mawr college after failing a class. She finds herself completely lost, suddenly defined by her inadequacy: “I am Hermione Gart, a failure” she proclaims at the very beginning of the novel. With a feeble ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
HERRICK’S END, a novel by T.M. Blanchet, reviewed by Jae Sutton
HERRICK’S END by T.M. Blanchet Tiny Fox Press, 299 pages reviewed by Jae Sutton Born and raised in Boston, mostly by his mother—who is loved by everyone she meets—Ollie Delgato has had to endure multiple hardships. But he has a plan. At nineteen, he is admitted to Bunker Hill Community College on a full scholarship and gets a job at Bonfligio’s Caffe, which comes with an apartment located just above the shop. His main goals are to lose weight and fall in love. More than anything, he wants to “become the kind of person that guys wanted to hang out with and girls wanted to date. Seven months to achieve normalcy.” Which is why the weight loss program, Lighter Tomorrows, becomes a constant on his summer schedule. Antonella (Nell) Cascone is the only girl who has ever given Ollie the time of day. They go on walks and platonic dates every week. When Nell shows up to both Lighter Tomorrows and the pair’s hangouts with bruises—which she covers with heavy sweaters and thick scarves—Ollie knows what kind of trouble she is in. It’s not until she goes missing that he realizes he should have done something sooner. Ollie sees this ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US, a Young Adult Novel by Joanna Ho, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US by Joanna Ho Harper Teen/HarperCollins Publishing, 437 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Danny Chen is a basketball phenom who loves watching the Star Wars trilogy and singing, albeit off-key, Sam Smith’s song “Lay Me Down.” He enjoys eating burgers from In-N-Out and break dancing like he’s a member of the dance troupe The Jabbawockeez. At school he’s larger than life— everyone knows and admires him for his kindness and outgoing personality. To Maybelline Chen, he’s her goofy and loving big brother who cheers her up, believes in her, and always has her back no matter what. But when Danny dies by suicide, May finds herself coping with more than just her brother’s passing. Joanna Ho’s compelling new novel The Silence That Binds Us explores the impact of suicide, and how important it is to use your voice to change the narrative and stand up against racism. News of Danny’s death soon circulates around Sequoia Park High School during May’s junior year. Between the few “I’m so sorries,” the whispers, and the downright silence, there is one voice that drowns out everyone else’s—that of Mr. Nate McIntyre, a local tech mogul, and father of her classmate ... Read the full review
A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST by László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet New Directions, 144 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A Mountain to the North, but even that feels generous. The grandson of Prince Genji, as he’s referred to throughout the novella, isn’t substantial enough to have his own name. He wears a kimono and geta, he gets motion sickness, and he loves gardens. He isn’t very notable, but he isn’t lacking either. He may be the only person, but he’s a supporting player, and as such his costars of trees, rocks, water, and wind often outshine him. The grandson of Prince Genji is our tour guide, a human figure we can hang our hats on as László Krasznahorkai chips away at the real story: the relentless, unending march of time over millions and billions of years. Geologic time may seem like a comically large topic for a novella, but it’s in good hands. Across his career, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has proven that he’s more than capable of tackling big, ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS, essays by Clarice Lispector, reviewed by Dylan Cook
TOO MUCH OF LIFE: THE COMPLETE CRÔNICAS by Clarice Lispector translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson New Directions, 864 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook A note of caution about Too Much of Life: reading it may cause you to question your reality. When Clarice Lispector took up her crônica column in 1967, she refused to give readers half-hearted, surface-level observations. Each crônica lets us see the world as Lispector saw it, and, under that microscopic magnification, even the most commonplace things become unfamiliar. Who are we when we’re asleep? Why do we lie? What’s the difference between “person” and “persona”? Or, as Lispector asks, “who am I? what am I? what will I be? who am I really? and am I really?” For our own sanity, we may choose not to question our being so closely because we’re afraid of what we may find. Lispector had no such fear. For Clarice Lispector, life was a never-ending process of becoming. She was born in Ukraine in 1920, but she became Brazilian when her family immigrated to escape the unrest of the Russian Civil War. She began her career writing for magazines until her successful debut Near to the Wild ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews, translation /
LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY, stories by Kim Fu, reviewed by Prisha Mehta
LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY by Kim Fu Tin House Books, 220 pages reviewed by Prisha Mehta A customer seeks out advanced simulation technology to recreate a conversation with her dead mother, but is refused on the grounds that relief from grief is too addictive a product to ethically sell. A young woman moves into a house crowded with hundreds of out-of-season June bugs as she recalls the emotionally abusive relationship she has just left behind. Every person on the planet loses their ability to taste, all of a sudden, all at once, and an artist makes a new career out of recreating food with physical sensation. These are the small worlds that populate Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st century, a short story collection containing twelve narratives that, though disparate in plot and subject, come together in a thematic and emotional symphony. This collection is Fu’s fourth major work, following her debut novel For Today I am a Boy (winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), her poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance, and her second novel The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. Fu’s ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
WIN ME SOMETHING, a novel by Kyle Lucia Wu, reviewed by Annie Cao
WIN ME SOMETHING by Kyle Lucia Wu Tin House, 272 pages reviewed by Annie Cao In Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu’s enthralling debut novel, Willa Chen is a biracial Chinese-American girl who starts a nannying job for the Adriens, a wealthy family in Tribeca. Willa has always struggled to feel a sense of belonging when it comes to community; she’s not fully Chinese but not fully white either. She faces racial prejudice and microaggressions while living in New Jersey as a child and New York as an adult. Her parents are divorced and have started their own separate families, but she has trouble feeling connected to either one. Whether because of her racial background or family situation, Willa exists on the margins—she sticks out due to her differences and is never truly understood. At the beginning of the novel, Willa claims that she just “[floats] silently through” the world, no one recognizing her struggles. Her life lacks defined movement; when Nathalie—her employer—asks about her future career plans, Willa indicates that she never had any. She might even want to be a nanny forever. The novel’s structure switches back and forth between Willa’s past experiences and current job with the ... Read the full review
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CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN, a novel by Coco Mellors, reviewed by Stephanie Fluckey
CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN by Coco Mellors Bloomsbury, 384 pages reviewed by Stephanie Fluckey I was attracted to the novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein because the title characters and I share something in common: a short courtship followed by elopement. In Coco Mellors’s debut novel, I was curious to see what she would do with this scenario, long fabled in movies and books, but also very real to me. My elopement was born out of love, seventeen hundred miles of distance, and an international border, while Cleo’s and Frank’s marriage was born out of love and an expiring visa. Though Cleo and Frank had to bear the same accusations of a marriage of convenience, which was neither of our motivations, our stories quickly evolved into something entirely different. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is part glamor and part monster, as the name suggests. Mellors bravely tells the story of a marriage that never shies away from the uncomfortable; she tackles hard subjects without embarrassment or deflection. This story is not a warm hug on a Sunday morning; it's a wake-up call after a long night. Sometimes we need a wake-up call. The novel opens with a charming meet-cute, where young, beautiful artist Cleo meets ... Read the full review
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The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, nonfiction by William Turner, reviewed by Jamie Tews
The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns by William Turner West Virginia University Press, 352 pages reviewed by Jamie Tews When I read William Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, I was living in Appalachia, commuting between Eastern Kentucky and Johnson City, Tennessee for work with the Appalachia Service Project (ASP). ASP is a home repair organization that seeks to eradicate substandard housing in central Appalachia. Working with ASP, I was introduced to Turner’s work. Before ASP’s summer volunteer season began, our content specialist, Clara Leonard, spent time in Hazard, Kentucky and Harlan County, Kentucky, talking with folks about their experience in the region. Near the end of Leonard’s first video in the two-part series, she asks Turner, a sociologist, why people don’t leave. He responds simply: home is where the heart is, and Harlan County is home. In the summer of 2019, I traveled around central Appalachia listening to people’s stories and writing about what I heard. Despite the different towns I was in, the different families I spoke with, most stories were rooted in the same sentiment: home is the most important thing, and Appalachia is home. Appalachia ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
SHADE OF BLUE TREES by Kelly Cressio-Moeller Two Sylvias Press, 79 pages reviewed by Dana Kinsey In her debut collection Shade of Blue Trees, Kelly Cressio-Moeller conducts a tremendous chorus of voices that rise in a dirge so mournful and lush that all of nature harmonizes; the beauty spellbinds, making the reader feel as if we’ve been privileged to witness language as a potent kind of magic. Mary Oliver, Joni Mitchell, Virginia Woolf, Paul Gauguin, Amy Winehouse, and e.e. cummings live in her lines, chant in her forests, and drench her in spring rain. She hears each of their voices and repurposes their words, sometimes as epigraphs, other times as dazzling lines within the music of her verse. Cressio-Moeller’s resulting symphony binds death and rebirth in the same notes, as she announces in “Threshold”: “Sometimes all that remains is rebirth. / Play me a mournful tune.” This poem, and so many others, are invitations from Cressio-Moeller to join her in a world that tosses away fearing mortality in favor of full immersion in the natural world. Even the evocative title of the collection suggests something both peaceful and dark in the same spare words. The word “shade” in the title ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER by Janelle Monáe Harper Voyager, 321 Pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson In her latest album Dirty Computer, songstress and visionary Janelle Monáe sings of a future bathed in the blinding light of a new regime. In a world where an individual’s inner circuitry—their deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires—faces judgment from the illuminating eye of New Dawn, freedom is sought out by those who find liberation in the shadows. Monáe’s songs follow the story of Jane 57821, whose queerness made society view her as a deviant with unclean coding—a “dirty computer.” Dreaming of a better future, Jane 57821 broke free of the chains of New Dawn by daring to remember who she really was, sowing the seeds of revolution in her wake. The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a collaborative work with influential writers of the Afrofuturism genre, exploring the expanded mythos Monáe created through her uniquely futuristic yet funky sound. Taking place in the same universe as Dirty Computer, The Memory Librarian is a collection of short stories set after Jane 57821’s daring escape. In the introduction “Breaking Dawn,” Monáe’s world unfolds like a memory uncurling itself ... Read the full review
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THE ORIGINAL GLITCH, a novel by Melanie Moyer, reviewed by Michael Sasso
THE ORIGINAL GLITCH by Melanie Moyer Lanternfish Press, 362 pages reviewed by Michael Sasso “Jesus was a carpenter, King Arthur was an orphan, and Laura was a broke, lonely millennial.” This is how Laura, the artificially intelligent protagonist, is summed up in Melanie Moyer’s sophomore novel, The Original Glitch (Lanternfish Press, October 2021). Every generation envisions its savior as one of its most unassuming: so, while the Wachowskis gave us introverted, Gen-X cyberhacker Neo in The Matrix films, Moyer provides Laura, the downtrodden but culturally-aware Millennial. Unlike Neo, however, Laura cannot escape her virtual prison, and her “magical” digital powers are lackluster. It is telling of the Millennial ethos that, even though the novel is about saving the world, the universe of The Original Glitch is familiar, ordinary, prosaic. Laura is created in reaction to a malevolent AI named Theo. When Theo’s creator, Dr. Kent, starts to believe that he’s an unhinged sociopath, she puts him in a digital prison locked inside a physical box. Then she conceives Laura: 1. to prove that an AI can be “good” and 2. as a possible weapon against Theo. (The Matrix parallels continue: Laura is Neo to Theo’s Agent Smith.) For more than ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
GOLD by Rumi translated by Haleh Liza Gafori New York Review Books, 112 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the thing that brings us into this world, ties us together, and makes the days pass more pleasantly. Don’t we love to live and live to love? And aren’t all the best songs love songs? Yet, offering up love as a balm to life’s problems feels cheap. We’re often skeptical, understandably so, that love alone can save us from issues like debt, disease, and desolation. In Gold, Rumi speaks to our inner skeptics. Line by line, he tries to show us how love only helps and never hurts. “If you plunge like a fish into Love’s ocean,” he asks, “what will happen?” This love of love is likely familiar to anyone who’s encountered Rumi before. Born in the thirteenth century in present-day Afghanistan, he remains one of the most popular poets in the United States. He was an Islamic scholar and a well-respected preacher for decades before he ever wrote a ... Read the full review
Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia by Jennifer Niesslein, Reviewed by Beth Kephart
DREADFUL SORRY: Essays on an American Nostalgia by Jennifer Niesslein Belt Publishing, 162 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart I have been reading Jennifer Niesslein’s new collection of essays—Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia—on a suddenly warm February afternoon. Outside on the deck I sit, the white stones of a fire pit glowing by my feet, the neighborhood kids riding their remarkably loud vehicles up and down and up and down the nearest driveway. Somewhere in Russia, Vladimir Putin is addressing his people with a long list of grievances. He is stamping his figurative foot, wishing for a yester-year, a yester-century, even. And because Putin wants what so long ago was, there are nearly 200,000 troops massed on the Ukrainian border. Putin’s nostalgia is maniacal. A pretext for death, destruction, war. Putin’s nostalgia is a bullying. It’s what he wants, and how he wants it, and the fact that he wants it now. What is this thing, nostalgia? What does the word rightly mean? What is it good for, and what good might it do? Those are the questions that set into motion the true stories at the heart of this thoughtful and thought-provoking collection. To Niesslein, who previously authored ... Read the full review
THE TENDEREST OF STRINGS, a novel by Steven Schwartz, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
THE TENDEREST OF STRINGS by Steven Schwartz Regal House Publishing, 260 pages reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell Steven Schwartz’s new novel The Tenderest of Strings is the story of a marriage and a family in trouble, an exploration of how family ties constrain and sustain, stretch and snap. Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and sons Harry and Jamie are recent transplants to Welden, Colorado. They moved from Chicago, “looking for a small-town cure and a fresh start” to Reuben’s professional struggles, Harry’s emotional and social problems, Jamie’s asthma, and increasing distance in the marriage. But rather than providing a geographic cure, the move to this small town exacerbates the Rosenfelds’ problems. There’s no synagogue. Their Victorian house is a money pit, and so is the financially strapped local paper where Reuben is editor in chief. Jamie’s asthma is worse. Harry is sullen. Ardith and Reuben haven’t made love in months. There’s an adage in fiction writing, “No trouble, no story.” Schwartz, author of two prior novels and four story collections, knows his way around stories, and families. The Rosenfelds’ troubles rapidly get worse. As a writer, I was interested by the efficiency with which the author introduces their predicament and prepares ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY, a novel by Laura Stanfill, appreciation by Beth Kephart
SINGING LESSONS FOR THE STYLISH CANARY by Laura Stanfill Lanternfish Press, 352 pages An appreciation by Beth Kephart On Sale: April 19, 2022 Picture a serinette: Music in a box. Notes arranged as pins. Crank it, and here it comes: the auditory sensation of someone whistling, maybe, or the chirp of cheerful birds. Now place that serinette into a quiet, magical village—an imaginary French town called Mireville, where women work lace and men craft these intricate music boxes and the sun shines ever so persistently, thanks to an incident some time ago, when a baby stopped crying and the clouds—well, they parted. A boy named Henri lives in the town of Mireville. His father, Georges, is the master serinette maker; serinettes are the family affair. Georges is also the long-ago baby who stopped crying, otherwise known as The Sun-Bringer. He is, additionally, not the very best father in the world, nor the very best husband, and he has a secret he likes to believe he’s good at keeping—a son on the opposite side of the world. A son named Robert who is growing up in a house that is part aviary, where singing canaries are most graciously accommodated by a ... Read the full review
THE NICK OF TIME, poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, reviewed by Candela Rivero
THE NICK OF TIME by Rosmarie Waldrop New Directions, 160 pages reviewed by Candela Rivero The week before reading Nick of Time by Rosmarie Waldrop, an American poet, translator, and editor, I had a conversation with one of my best friends as we drove back from the mall. “Do you believe in parallel universes?” I asked her. It has been a burning question in the back of my mind –– like a twinkling star threatening to become stardust. “Well, that depends,” she answered. “The only thing between us and that other universe is choices– and time.” A week later, as I delved into Waldrop’s world, I felt understood. My uncertainties about the universe echoed her own philosophical questions. Nick of Time is structured in ten chapters, some composed of individual poems and others like “Velocity but No Location” being a chapter-long poem. The last chapter, “Rehearsing the Symptoms,” includes eleven poems all titled with verbs in the present continuous tense such as “Wanting,” “Thinking,” and “Doubting.” Through her poetry –– specifically her use of metaphor, imagery, and reflection —she explores the concept of time. Each poem seems to birth from a question about the role of time and existence. For ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
AUTOPSY OF A FALL, poems by Eric Morales-Franceschini, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz
AUTOPSY OF A FALL by Eric Morales-Franceschini Newfound Press, 48 pages reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz Autopsy of a Fall by Eric Morales-Franceschini is many things at once: nostalgic and bitter, analytical and volatile, epic and intimate. It is a masterful reckoning of Puerto Rico’s present, both as, “this little isla and its debts,” the magical, eden-like place that Morales-Franceshini mythologies in his early recollections of his home island, and the utopian island that it could be should it gain independence. The form this book takes is that of a personal history that is intertwined with the legacy of western (specifically American) colonization of Puerto Rico and, inversely, the legacy of resistance and decolonization movements of Puerto Rico. Because this book is entrenched in the relationship between nostalgia and colonialism, it is filled with cultural iconographies of Puerto Rican life, often dissecting them and showing how the nuances of their meanings speak to colonization of Puerto Rico and the effect it has on the author. For example, the book begins with the poem titled, “The Flamboyán,” the name of a species of trees in Puerto Rico, known for its clusters of red and gold blooms, so vibrant that the tree ... Read the full review
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PHOTOTAXIS, a novel by Olivia Tapiero, reviewed by Dylan Cook
PHOTOTAXIS by Olivia Tapiero translated by Kit Schluter Nightboat Books, 128 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be our downfall. Perhaps even more grating, they go through the trouble of explaining exactly how it will end, as if we can be certain of that from our pre-apocalyptic world. Tapiero looks at these conventions and casually walks past them. In Phototaxis, the end of the world makes very little sense. The streets are drowned in rotten meat, suicides spread like they’re contagious, and the only thing that might hold everyone together is a one-man piano performance. She embraces the one idea about the apocalypse we can reasonably be sure of: when it happens, we won’t have any idea how to deal with it. Given that the novel revels in uncertainty, it’s unsurprising that its plot is difficult to pin down. There are three main characters, Théo, Narr, and Zev, who, for the most part, meander through their lives while trapped in the “levity that precedes catastrophe.” In some unspecific past, ... Read the full review
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SHE, poems by Theadora Siranian, reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz
SHE Theadora Siranian Seven Kitchen Press, 35 pages reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz Theadora’s Siranian’s chapbook, She, is violently intoxicating and sobering at the same time. In investigating loss and trauma, she chooses to present the messy over the meditative. Siranian invites her readers into proximity and distance simultaneously: showcasing the immediate and visceral in the body of her poems, but nesting them under titles that take a step back. She begins with pseudo-abstract poem titles such as “Origin Myth,” “Her,” and “Erytheia,” and when the poem nears its end, she twists our necks to a visceral image: a man’s forearm sliced open by a trapped rabbit, a family attempting to watch tv after their child burned alive, her mother’s skin peeling off her body. The book is separated into three sections, each beginning with a poem titled, “Origin Myth.” It is important to note that this isn’t the only instance in which a poem title is repeated. There are six poems titled “Her,” not including the poem titled, “Killing HerEach origin myth differs in tone, they are tethered together in a collective project. When Siranian writes: What was always fresh and unknown was perhaps not the moment, but it's ... Read the full review
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ARTIFICE IN THE CALM DAMAGES by Andrew Levy Chax, 176 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne The traditional identification of poet and prophet is acceptable only in the sense that the poet is about as slow in reflecting his epoch as the prophet. If there are prophets and poets who can be said to have been ‘ahead of their time’, it is because they have expressed certain demands of social evolution not quite as slowly as the rest of their kind. Trotsky said it best: “All through history, the mind limps after reality.”  The aloof intelligentsia continues to believe in the power of reason alone to move the world.  No amount of revolution has yet changed this fact.  As a recent electoral outcome pretends to remedy the hyper-capitalistic state of siege in which we all currently exist, neoliberalism, a name which in itself has become insufficient to describe the evolving phenomenon, applies an over-the-counter balm to a suppurating gangrenous wound. Into this hyperkinetic stasis comes Artifice in the Calm Damages by Andrew Levy.  It is a series of meditations on the self as written repeatedly onto a historical palimpsest in an attempt to describe a personal politics adequate to the age ... Read the full review
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SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE: FINDING LIFE WHERE LAND AND WATER MEET, nonfiction by Patricia Hanlon, reviewed by Michael McCarthy
SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE: Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet by Patricia Hanlon Bellevue Literary Press 224 pages reviewed by Michael McCarthy Six Ways to Look at a Marsh  Swimming to the Top of the Tide, Patricia’s Hanlon’s delightful debut book, follows her through New England’s Great Marsh as she swims its creeks and channels every day for an entire year. It is a captivating, adroit climate dispatch from Gloucester, Mass. that views the crisis of global warming through a local lens. In grappling with the potential destruction of her beloved home ecosystem, there emerge six ways of looking at the Great Marsh. 1. As a painter Hanlon puts pen to paper as beautifully as she puts brush to canvas. Before turning to the written word, she painted the Great Marsh in her free time, savoring its nuances of color, play of light, and dance of winds. Her paintings, available here, reveal the intricate palette of the landscape, which can be easily mistaken for a massive green blob. By bringing a painter’s eye to her prose, she deftly captures “the action of this mass, its verbs.” It is a living, breathing ecosystem, and around it dwell ... Read the full review
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SCORPIONFISH, a novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, reviewed by Aleksia Silverman
SCORPIONFISH by Natalie Bakopoulos Tin House, 256 pages reviewed by Aleksia Mira Silverman Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos begins with a return. Mira, a Greek-born academic in her late thirties, arrives in Athens after her parents' funeral. She must sort out the remainder of her parents' affairs—Mira’s childhood home in Athens and another apartment on an island referred to only as N. While Mira is stranded outside her apartment building without a key, she has a chance encounter with her next-door neighbor, a sea captain. Later, the pair spend night after night on their adjoining balconies. While they are unable to see each other clearly, they share cigarettes, beer, and conversation. Both characters are grappling with grief, of sorts: Mira has lost her parents; the Captain has lost his position as a sea captain and is about to divorce his estranged wife. Bakopoulos splits the novel between Mira and the Captain's perspective, their two stories spinning out alongside each other like "a double helix”—often occupying parallel tracks, but enjoying brief points of intense connection as they navigate loss. Guided by Bakopoulos' observant prose, the reader enmeshes themselves in a dynamic social scene. We meet Nefeli, an acclaimed artist in her sixties; Aris, Mira's ... Read the full review
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WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS by Nana Nkweti Graywolf Press, 200 pages reviewed by Juliana Lamy The ten stories in Nana Nkweti’s debut short story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells offer tableaus of Blackness that are as varied as they are vivid. From tale to tale, Nkweti’s genres shift as surely as a living body does, limbs never at a single angle for long. The same assortment of stories that renders a realistic portrait of race and romance within New York City’s Black literary scene delves, with the same intrepid narration, into a crime drama’s layered violence and moral contemplation. Though varied, what anchors these stories within one another’s vicinity is a relentless inquisition of human connectivity, a tour that proceeds whether such connection hues grotesque and brutal or beautiful and palliative. Black girls navigate personal and cultural identity as the collection arcs through fandom space in “Rain Check at MomoCon.” Readers alight in a Lagos beleaguered by a zombie apocalypse in “It Just Kills You Inside,” where racial capitalism and white condescension commodify African people unto apparent death. In “The Living Infinite,” our transatlantic vault to Louisiana reveals Nala, a 202-year-old Mami Wata (a female water spirit and seducer of ... Read the full review
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CATALOGUE BABY: A MEMOIR OF INFERTILITY by Myriam Steinberg; illustrations by Christache Page Two, 304 pages reviewed by Brian Burmeister The graphic memoir Catalogue Baby shares the deeply personal fertility journey of Myriam Steinberg. Compelled to leave her career, passion, and life as a festival organizer to pursue motherhood as a single 40-year-old, Steinberg’s immensely honest memoir chronicles the intense challenges she faced getting pregnant and carrying to term. Throughout the five years of her life covered in the book, Steinberg skillfully navigates shame, guilt, and loss in ways that help us understand the pain and frustration she was experiencing while balancing those brutal realities with humor. Among other amusements, we are welcomed to the literal “Carnival of Dreams Brought to You by I.V.F” where at the egg-shot carnival game you are given “10 shots for the price of your dignity and patience.” One of Steinberg’s many strengths is making her journey accessible through playfulness. In addition, her narrative is clear and relatable—even though her story is very much uniquely her own. Her desire for a baby and the difficulties she faced along the way are shared by many, and she welcomes us into her life through carefully and regularly ... Read the full review
Dear Bear
DEAR BEAR by Ae Hee Lee Platypus Press, 42 pages Reviewed by Juniper Jordan Cruz Dear Bear begins with the gripping dedication, “For Daniel, to the end,” and from there, takes its readers to the end of the world it introduces. This is author Ae Hee Lee’s world that exists in a collection of letters addressed to the titular Bear—who is both a real and parabolic bear. The book is set in a forest, “at the border of every ruin, of every past home.” The forest is also both real and parabolic as a form of borderland, acting as a Romantic landscape: sublime and shaped around the speaker’s psyche. Because of this, the forest becomes a vessel for the speaker's exploration of the relationship between her and Bear. Ae Hee Lee establishes the forest as a post-apocalyptic setting to navigate both the relief and anxiety that comes from surviving an old world and entering a new one. In this case, Lee’s ‘Dear Bear’ speaks on the annihilation of an old life that comes with falling into new love. The “crossover from one to two” simultaneously contends with its own borderland: the end of two singular people and the beginning of ... Read the full review
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THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD by Krys Malcolm Belc, reviewed by Beth Kephart
THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD: A MEMOIR OF NONBINARY PARENTHOOD Krys Malcolm Belc Counterpoint Press 304 pages Reviewed by Beth Kephart Krys Malcolm Belc—nonbinary, transmasculine, and talented—begins his memoir with an Irish dance—“all jumping and pounding, the tight black laces against my calves, the bang of hard shoes on the floor.” He is young and the music permeates, and now, he writes, “I try to remember what it was like then, when I was four and five and six, if I was unhappy. I am supposed to remember being unhappy, but mostly what I remember is what it’s like to stand there knowing the dance is about to start.” Supposed to remember. Supposed to be. Supposed to become. But suppose does not fit the life Belc will live. Competitive, just like his father. Prone to moments of rage. Enrolled in an all-girls’ Catholic school, dressed in the costumery of girlhood. A girlfriend who becomes a boyfriend who becomes a partner, a parent, a “natural mother of the child,” according to legal documents, and then, at last, following the birth of his child and testosterone treatments, a human being who, with his beard, shaved head, and Cross-Fit body, is assessed by ... Read the full review
A GHOST IN THE THROAT, a novel by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, reviewed by Beth Kephart
A GHOST IN THE THROAT by Doireann Ní Ghríofa Biblioasis [North American edition forthcoming in June] reviewed by Beth Kephart “This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion. A female text because Ní Ghríofa suffuses her days with the domestic arts of hoovering, dusting, folding, mothering, and bends her prose toward those ticking rhythms when she carves out a moment and writes. A female text because Ní Ghríofa carries the lament of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman of the late eighteenth century, in her bones as she works—a poem called Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem of howling grief erupted from the murder of the poet’s husband. A female text because the words have risen up in Ní Ghríofa and stayed: This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type. Ordinary, too, the ricochet of thought that swoops, now, from my body to yours. Ní Ghríofa wants us to know the story of the widow, whose poem still keens across the centuries but whose biography ... Read the full review
These violent delights book jacket
THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS by Chloe Gong Simon Pulse, Simon & Schuster, 464 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a vibrant reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, taking place during the Roaring Twenties in Shanghai of 1926. Gong’s tale of two star-crossed yet ill-fated lovers begins in the middle of a fierce blood feud between two warring gangs: the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Described as “an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time,” their bitter vendetta runs deeper than the Huangpu River that cuts through the city. The weight of each gang’s future rests heavily on the shoulders of both Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlets, and Roma Montagov, heir to the White Flowers. The pain of betrayal burns at each heir’s core, engulfing their previous love in flames. However, when a sinister presence lurking within the depths of the Huangpu threatens all of Shanghai, Juliette and Roma must work together if they ever hope to save everyone, including each other. I thoroughly enjoyed Gong’s rendition of a timeless classic, combining Shakespearean pomp with Jazz Age flair. Her story of Juliette and Roma still rings true to the original, but what ... Read the full review
Come on up cover art
COME ON UP by Jordi Nopca translated by Mara Faye Lethem Bellevue Literary Press, 224 pages reviewed by Michael McCarthy At first, it’s a promise. Come on up! It’s a pledge made to every up-and-comer in Barcelona. The city provides a backdrop for Jordi Nopca’s short story collection Come On Up, translated from Catalan to English by Mara Faye Lethem. His stories skillfully traverse decadence and depravity, splendor and squalor, the tragic and the comic, the boring and the absurd. They will resonate with anyone who has a decent job, a decent home, and decent career prospects but is still somehow broke. Take it from Nopca. The city and its denizens are in rough shape: Barcelona is a tourist favorite, but it’s going through a delicate moment. Some of the most expensive boutiques in the world have opened up shop on the Passeig de Gràcia. The Old Quarter gleams with the urine of British, Swedish, Italian, and Russian visitors, which unabashedly blends in with the indigenous liquid evacuations. In Sarrià-Sant Gervasi and Les Corts, there are some neighbors whose only activity is walking their little dogs and holding on to their family inheritances. […] The Eixample is full of old ... Read the full review
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WHITE MAGIC by Elissa Washuta Tin House, 432 pages reviewed by Eric Buechel In Elissa Washuta’s book of linked essays, ​White Magic​, she writes about her substance abuse candidly, describing getting high with cough syrup as a teenager in her school’s bathroom between classes. In a later scene, a doctor pleads with her to stop drinking—there’s something wrong with her insides, and she's been urinating blood. As these essays progress, Washuta retraces the reasons for her self-destructiveness in a culture that treats her, a Native woman, as an expendable object. To understand her experience, she uses ideas from witchcraft, tarot, astrology, and even Twitter discourse as resources. With this, she creates a beautifully-rendered piece of art that isn’t easily labeled. Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz tribe of southern Washington. I grew up not far from their reservation. I also lived in Seattle during the time that she did, frequenting many of the places described in this book. As a child, I had no conception of ancestral land or colonization. These things were deemed too uncomfortable to be discussed. Displacement and environmental racism were facts I only came to be aware of later in life. To read about the ... Read the full review
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Atlantis Black book jacket
THE BOOK OF ATLANTIS BLACK: THE SEARCH FOR A SISTER GONE MISSING by Betsy Bonner Tin House, 272 pages reviewed by Laura Smith “Remove toxic people from your life” is one of today’s modern mantras. It’s easy advice to give, but it can be impossible to follow. Author Betsy Bonner can vouch for this. Her personal history is steeped in family toxicity: an environment of abuse, uncertainty, and guilt from which she just can’t shake free. Bonner knows this. She also considers herself the lucky one. In her memoir, The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing, Bonner writes, “My own life has been shaped by what I inherited; most of all, my sister’s story.” Her sister, Atlantis Black, the self-named alias of a volatile rock musician from Pennsylvania, was found dead in a hotel room in Tijuana on June 25, 2008. The cause of death was listed as pancreatic hemorrhage brought on by a drug overdose. There was a lot that didn’t add up about her death, but there was also plenty that did. The Book of Atlantis Black isn’t an episode of 60 Minutes stapled together into a neat pile of text. It’s a ... Read the full review
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MORE MIRACLE THAN BIRD, a novel by Alice Miller reviewed by Jozie Konczal
MORE MIRACLE THAN BIRD by Alice Miller Tin House Books, 352 pages reviewed by Jozie Konczal I approached More Miracle than Bird, Alice Miller’s debut novel about W.B. Yeats and his erstwhile muse, Georgie Hyde-White, as a poet interested in learning about Yeats and the woman who influenced his work. Although we get insights about the poet and his work, the novel is more about the journey of his muse, a naïve but determined rebel attempting to thwart the traditional roles that have been carved out for her. We see her youthful struggles and missteps, but by the novel’s close, we see a woman who has learned that holding onto the philandering Yeats means reshaping herself into someone who can contribute to his work ... Read the full review
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A World Between book jacket
A WORLD BETWEEN by Emily Hashimoto Feminist Press, 440 pages reviewed by Ashira Shirali Let’s be honest—the chances of walking into a bookstore and finding a literary lesbian romance are low. You’re more likely to find an entire cookbook consisting of sourdough recipes. If you want the book to feature characters of color, your odds sink even lower. Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel promises to fill this lacuna. A World Between (Feminist Press, forthcoming) follows the relationship between two women of color, Leena and Eleanor, through college and adulthood. The novel alternates between Leena’s and Eleanor’s perspectives, revealing the yearnings and anxieties of each as they grow apart and together. There is much to marvel at in this debut. Hashimoto is adept at plotting. She pulls Leena and Eleanor apart with narrative developments that are both unexpected and believable. The novel heightens tension as we long for the two’s reunion despite circumstances, family expectations and their own struggles. Eleanor and Leena’s conflicts are heartbreakingly realistic. Their fights remind us that in real life there are no villains or heroes, just two people whose earnest feelings clash. Hashimoto deploys details masterfully. She can bring characters to life with just a handful of ... Read the full review
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Garden by the Sea book jacket
GARDEN BY THE SEA by Mercè Rodoreda translated by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño Open Letter Books, 203 pages reviewed by Anthony Cardellini When I began my part-time job at a botanical garden in the fall of 2017, I had next to zero gardening experience, and I knew little about the different flowers and trees that grow in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. I showed up that first day completely unprepared, without so much as a pair of gloves. But I was lucky enough to be mentored by David, a man in his early thirties from Maine, who’d been gardening for several years. David explained to me the paradoxical nature of caring for gardens: gardens need constant attention, but they bear their beautiful fruits ever so slowly. At the heart of David’s message was that gardeners are transitory, but gardens remain. Our decades are their hours ... Read the full review
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Little Envelope Cover Art.jpg
LITTLE ENVELOPE OF EARTH CONDITIONS by Cori A. Winrock Alice James Books, 85 pages reviewed by Charlotte Hughes I read Little Envelope of Earth Conditions in late June, when COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in the world and the nation—and at home. The May 24th New York Times front page, which listed the names of the 100,000 American coronavirus victims—a very public display of mourning and grief—was at the forefront of my memory, as were the more personal ways that I was mourning the loss of traditions, previous ways of life, time spent with grandparents and my fellow high school students alike. Throughout her second collection of lyric poems, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, Cori A. Winrock explores the experience of mourning: specifically, the idea that grief is an ongoing, recurring experience that never truly goes away. It is simultaneously universal and intensely personal. She tells a compelling narrative about the loss of a mother and child, spanning from the vast emptiness of space to an ambulance in a parking lot to a placid meadow on the edge of a lake. The ... Read the full review
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Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero translated by Frances Riddle Feminist Press, 128 pages reviewed by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi In her debut novel, Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero takes an unflinching and intimate look into the turbulent homes and lives of Latin American women. By placing her powerful, moving stories in settings like violent domestic households or lower income neighborhoods, the characters in Ampuero’s Cockfight combat their situations with acts of bravery, loss, and love. As the characters seem to suffocate in their environments, there are acts of bravery, loss, and love. The idea of a happy family is a myth and men are depicted as lecherous, terrifying creatures of the night. The narrators often are maids, young girls, and women wrenched into horrifying situations such as forced incest, rape, and human trafficking ... Read the full review
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Tigers Not Daughters book jacket
TIGERS, NOT DAUGHTERS by Samantha Mabry Algonquin Young Readers 288 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Samantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters is a modern-day ghost story that follows the Torres sisters—Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa—one year after the untimely death of their oldest sister, Ana. Wracked with grief, the Torres sisters ache for Ana; but their profound sadness is met with unexpected events that eventually make their sister’s presence known: raps on doors and windows, writings on the walls, sensory overload, recurring storms, flickering lights, dying animals, and one escaped spotted hyena lurking in the darkness of their neighborhood in Southtown. Ana reappears in a way the girls can’t begin to imagine and returns with a vengeance they don’t understand. Mabry tells a riveting tale of three sisters who discover the power of sisterhood and what it means to stay together despite insurmountable, unnatural odds. What stood out to me while reading Tigers, Not Daughters was how colorful and tangible each of the Torres sisters is. Their characterization is well-rounded, Mabry vividly telling the story through the individual perspectives of each sister, as well as including a fourth perspective of a character that watches them from afar. Each sister is unique in ... Read the full review
The Sport of the Gods book jacket
THE SPORT OF THE GODS by Paul Laurence Dunbar Signet Classics, 176 pages reviewed by Dylan Cook For the best experience, I recommend reading The Sport of the Gods outside on a cloudy day, rain threatening. As you fall in step with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s rhythmic prose, it’ll be easy to forget that you’re at nature’s mercy. Let the clouds decide whether or not you get to read uninterrupted. Subject to this force, you may more easily understand what the Hamilton family endures in this novel. As deceits and misfortunes pile on top of each other, the Hamiltons decide that nature can’t help but rain down upon them. Their breakdown is more than plain bad luck can explain, so they know that they are fighting, “against some Will infinitely stronger than their own.” Even if you haven’t heard of Paul Laurence Dunbar, you’ve likely read lines of his poetry. Maya Angelou immortalized his poem “Sympathy” when she borrowed a line for the title of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Discussing her influences, Angelou lauded Dunbar in the same breath as Shakespeare. Dunbar was born to former slaves in Ohio in 1872, right in the middle of ... Read the full review
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Clotel book jacket
In 1998, scientists performed a DNA test to answer one of the longest running rumors in American history. Historians could no longer deny the truth: Yes, Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. But plenty of people already knew that. William Wells Brown knew this beyond a reasonable doubt when he published Clotel in 1853, a novel that imagines the lives and tribulations of Jefferson’s slave-born daughters. The characters are all fictional, but Brown’s creative liberties stray little from reality. Masters frequently made concubines of their slaves, so why would Jefferson be any exception? Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal” were a farce in Brown’s eyes, because only in antebellum America could a president’s daughter be born in chains ... Read the full review
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THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING, a novel by Joseph Fasano, reviewed by Michael McCarthy
In the moral universe of poet Joseph Fasano’s debut novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, death lurks in every corner of life. A father, bereaved of his wife, must journey through the teeming forests of British Columbia and hunt a fabled mountain lion, to him the very “mind of the wild.” Three years ago, it mauled his son, the father powerless to save him. Now, as he narrates his monomaniacal fight for survival, the hunt for the mountain lion becomes an obsession, borne of unfathomable grief, to exact revenge on a world that has stolen everything he loved ... Read the full review
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ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, a novel by Ocean Vuong, reviewed by Claire Kooyman
Ocean Vuong’s writing is steeped in memories, the history of which sometimes precedes him chronologically. This was true of his poetry in the collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and it is also true of his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, recently released by Penguin Press. This novel is a recursive exploration of the path memories take through a family. The narrator’s life is impacted by the traumas his mother and grandmother suffered before he was born. As a very young child, Vuong’s narrator, Little Dog, learns quickly that not all authority figures can be trusted absolutely, and that even unconditional love has flaws. Throughout the novel, Vuong illustrates that we are all sharing space with the past, even as we exist in the present ... Read the full review
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Cleanness Book Jacket
At its heart, Cleanness is a novel about duality: the duality of spirit, of desire, of self-perception. How one can be “dirty” and “clean” at the same time. With deft and expressive writing, Greenwell questions our understanding of these concepts. What does it mean to be dirty? What does it mean to be clean? To go outside or stay in. To stay in or go outside. Perhaps they are just two facets of the same thing ... Read the full review
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Cover art for What I Carry
From the very first moment of her existence, Muiriel was born alone. Found abandoned at a medical center with no parents to claim her, Muiriel has lived in foster care her entire life. But blessed with a book of survival by naturalist John Muir and her experience in nearly twenty different foster homes, seventeen-year-old Muiriel knows she will not let her past dictate her future: Aging out is terrifying ... Read the full review
TO THE BONE, poems by Angela Narciso Torres, reviewed by Alina Stefanescu
To The Bone is a book about the particular sort of remembering that accompanies losing a parent to Alzheimer's. The poet's mother is brought tenuously, haltingly, on the page. A sense of slippage is accomplished through layering, repetitions, and fluctuating temporality to reveal how a disease of memory appears to the mind struggling to find shore in presence ... Read the full review
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MINOR DETAIL, a novel by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and reviewed by Dylan Cook
Tables need at least three legs to stand; guitar strings only ring when taut around two points. Minor Detail, Adania Shibli’s third novel, takes its title as a challenge: how much can hinge upon one moment? How can a single moment of pain bridge the past to the present?  ... Read the full review
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Book Jacket
Jenn Shapland’s hybridized memoir and biography straddles what its seemingly-impossible title suggests: an ability to write about oneself by writing about someone else. Far from taking on a myopic or narcissistic project, ​My Autobiography of Carson McCullers i​s eager to talk about the self for the sake of empathy, to revive written-off lives, to question presumed heterosexualities, and to make a bodily connection with now-irrecoverable marginalized bodies ... Read the full review
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THE ROYAL ABDULS, a novel by Ramiza Shamoun Koya, reviewed by Beth Kephart
During the day and a half that I ravenously read Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel, The Royal Abduls, I asked myself these questions. I leaned into the lives of Koya’s magnificently drawn characters, into the nest of troubles they inadvertently twigged together, into the love they did not know how to express. Or forgot to express. Or ran out of time to express ... Read the full review
Square Hunting Book Jacket
In a short piece of writing on “London Under Siege,” written during World War II, Virginia Woolf wrote that “everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.” Reading these words now, as we live through a different collective social crisis, I am reminded of the significance of individual intellectual and emotional life as a key form of sustenance and even political action ... Read the full review
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POLITICS IS FOR POWER, nonfiction by Eitan Hersh, reviewed by Brian Colker
On a recent Sunday under quarantine, my spouse Susan Sheu and I donned costume wigs for our Zoom meeting. Twelve volunteers from the Los Angeles area sat at our respective kitchen tables, couches, and easy chairs and wrote postcards for California 38th District assembly member Christy Smith, who is running for Congress via a special election on May 12. Susan came up with the concept “wigging out for Democracy”; she thought that wearing wigs would be a festive and interesting way to make the Zoom meeting less tedious. It worked well: despite the quarantine and general malaise, wearing the wigs did add levity and made the afternoon go by faster. Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, believes that Zoom meetings like this are critical for progressives. In his new book, Politics is for Power, he contrasts volunteer activity with posting rants on Facebook or watching the news, which he brands “hobbyism”. For decades, organizers from Saul Alinsky, infamous ‘radical’ and author of the classic Rules for Radicals,  and Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz, the intellectual godfather of Obama For America, have pondered how to get liberals off their couches (and off social media) to take meaningful action ... Read the full review
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The Beauty of Their Youth book jacket
There are five Hinnefeld stories, four of them previously published in literary journals, in The Beauty of Their Youth, a release from the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. One is about the legacy of a “pool of desire.” One is about the accessorizing of a family crime. One is about the tragedy of idle desires, another about an artist and his elastic resume, and another about a mother and daughter on a trip abroad and the reverb of the personal past. The stories take us to Bucks County, PA, inside the pages of a Carson McCullers book, toward Everglades gators and gun shows, through the annals of art, across parts of Greece and Rome—a tour of landscape and psyche that is seamless, self-assured, quietly inventive. Hinnefeld doesn’t break her own spells. She doesn’t remind you that she’s writing ... Read the full review
Soujourners of the In-Between Book Jacket
In his new heartbreaking and affirming book of poems, his seventh, Gregory Djanikian writes past complexity toward the elemental and the binding. He unites the “beautiful and the raw,” plays no tricks, displays no tics, exploits nothing but the moment and the thought that accompanies it. He finds the reader wherever the reader is, then webs her into his space and time, a place where a hand run along the back of a cat returns “the animality of my own skin/the trees in slanting light,/ the blue sky breathing its blue/down to the greening fields.” (“What Is a Cat But a Voice Among All the Other Voices”) In Djanikian’s space and time, the end may be near, it may be hastening toward us, but it is still, as yet, a yonder ... Read the full review
HOW TO BUILD A HEART, a young adult novel by Maria Padian, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
HOW TO BUILD A HEART by Maria Padian Algonquin Young Readers, 339 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Isabella Crawford doesn’t keep secrets, she guards them. Protects them: People love to talk about themselves, and if you keep directing the conversation and questions back to them, they leave the interaction with the impression you’re the absolute best. Even though you haven’t told them a damn thing. I’m crazy good at this game. And I’ve had years of practice. For Izzy, a failure to safeguard a secret means the life she meticulously crafted for herself is in jeopardy. She’d prefer not to keep most of her life hidden away; but she also knows that the less you share about yourself, the less you get hurt. In her new novel How to Build a Heart, Maria Padian brings us into Izzy’s world with one of her biggest secrets: she’s poor and lives with her mother, little brother, and dog in Meadowbrook Gardens, a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Aside from her best friend and closest confidante, Roz, nobody knows where she lives – or how she’s lived. And she intends to keep it that way.   ... Read the full review
reviews, young adult fiction reviews /
Incidental Inventions book jacket
Who is the Italian novelist we call Elena Ferrante? Since her first novel’s publication in 1992, she—with the help of her publishers—has carefully maintained the real author’s anonymity. Many readers have treated this guarded privacy as a playful challenge, making theories and guesses, particularly in recent years as Ferrante has become increasingly celebrated. The Italian philologist Marco Santagata, after analyzing her oeuvre, suggested she might be the writer Marcella Marmo (Marmo and her publisher denied this). More controversially, the journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records to claim that Anita Raja is the author behind Ferrante—others suggest it may be Raja’s husband. One can imagine the confirmation of one of these claims could incite a variety of reactions in Ferrante’s readership, but there’s a more fundamental question behind that of the author’s identity: why do people want to know? ... Read the full review
Outside Myself book jacket
OUTSIDE MYSELF by Kristen Witucki Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 232 pages reviewed by Donna W. Hill Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Superbly written, Outside Myself by Kristen Witucki gets to the heart of the human experience. Blended and broken families struggle with issues that tear parents and children apart. Trying to do their best, they are fettered by incomplete and often false information. At the center of it all, two very different blind characters, determined to create their own place in the world, grapple with the negativity in their families, communities and themselves. Outside Myself covers roughly fifteen months from May 1994 to August 1995. It is told by two narrators; Tallie, a young and precocious blind girl, and Benjamin, a withdrawn grandfather who works at a library for the blind. They represent different age groups, genders, races, belief systems and causes of blindness, growing up in different eras with different rights under the law. Tallie, the child of a broken marriage, attends a Christian youth group, where she realizes that some of the kids want to pray for her healing. She wonders why so many people are invested in her becoming sighted. Whether through medical advances or faith healing, their ... Read the full review
Sketches of the Criminal World Book Jacket
SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD: FURTHER KOLYMA STORIES by Varlam Shalamov translated by Donald Rayfield New York Review Books, 576 pages  reviewed by Dylan Cook Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver A man gets ready to murder his boss with a pickaxe. A woman is grateful that her newborn twins don’t survive. A doctor refuses to treat new patients, fearing that someone has been sent to kill him. Characters like these populate Varlam Shalamov’s criminal world, the depraved underbelly of society born and bred in the Soviet prison system. Many of the criminal world’s citizens were locked up under vague pretenses of “counterrevolutionary activity,” so why should they uphold the laws that failed them in the first place? Why not murder and steal before your neighbor beats you to it? Morals, after a while, can become relative. Life in prison may get easier without a domineering boss, cheaper without children to care for, and safer without new faces in the ward. Varlam Shalamov was a natural dissenter. Born to an Orthodox priest in 1907, Shalamov lived as a staunch atheist. As Josef Stalin rose to power, Shalamov joined a Trotskyist group in direct opposition to the new government. There, he ... Read the full review
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YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs book jacket
YEAR BY YEAR: Poems by Lynne Sachs Tender Buttons Press, 64 pages reviewed by Sharon Harrigan Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver When Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she asked herself one simple question: How have the private, most intimate moments of her life been affected by the public world beyond? The poems she wrote in response turned into this book. One poem for each year. Sachs is a well-known experimental filmmaker. Year by Year is her first book of poetry, and in many ways it can be appreciated as the logical extension of her career as a visual storyteller. She describes her films as combining “memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes.” Such a description might also be applied to her poems. Year by Year dips into memoir when it recounts events in her personal life. The glimpses into current events have a documentary feel. When Sachs describes moments she was present for but cannot possibly remember, such as her own birth, the book takes us into fictional territory. The hybrid form (memoir/documentary/fiction) is one experimental element. But even more innovative is the way she often presents us with two versions of the same poem. The handwritten draft and the ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
Barren desert landscape
César Valdebenito, translated by Toshiya KameiTHE GREATEST LANDSCAPE HE HAD EVER SEEN In the summer midday, he was seated on a blanket in his underwear, with his boots on. His horse was five or six meters away while his gaunt dog Toby was asleep. He had turned on the radio and was listening to the news, but twenty minutes later he got bored. About fifty meters away his flock of sheep wandered. Robust, peaceful, and healthy, they kept grazing. He grabbed his rifle, which he had brought back from Pueblo Seco, Mexico a few years earlier. He had always wanted to try it, but he had never found the time or the opportunity. He was one of the best shooters, if not the best in that mountain range and had always wanted to know how good he was. What had stopped him? He had no answers. So he took aim at the nearest tree. The shot sounded and the leaves shook. The dog woke up and the horse jumped. Then, with great deliberation, he aimed toward his herd. He gunned down a sheep with the first shot. The horse trotted away. With amazing quickness, he aimed at the horse. For ... Read the full review
Flash, Issue 28, translation /
The Book of Sarah
Sarah Lightman's poignant, engrossing and poetic graphic memoir, The Book of Sarah , leads the reader on an epic odyssey, moving back and forth in time, from the author’s early twenties as an uncertain, dependent, and depressed young artist to a confident forty-five-year-old woman who is finally the architect of her own life ... Read the full review
graphic narrative reviews, reviews /
Degrees of Difficulty jacket cover
I thought a lot about this family as I read Julie Justicz’s novel Degrees of Difficulty. Here the child at the center of the heartbreak is third-born Ben, born with damage to his twenty-first chromosome, an “omission in the blueprint” that has resulted in “the recessed jaw that would lead to feeding issues, the missing kidney due to frequent injections, hospitalizations, IV medications. And later, the seizures: Body-wracking grand mals that daily medications could not control.” ... Read the full review
Book Cover Grand Union
Grand Union, a collection of nineteen works of short fiction, represents an exciting addition to her oeuvre. The characters it features—black and white, young and old, male and female, gay and straight, and hailing from both sides of the Atlantic—are as diverse a cast as populate her novels, but their stories veer from the first-person narrative to the nonlinear and surreal to the essayistic ... Read the full review
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Ruby and Roland Book Jacket
When Faith Sullivan began writing what has become known as her Harvester books—novels like The Cape Ann and The Empress of One and Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse—she invited readers to join her in a fictional Minnesota landscape, then gave them many reasons to return. Sullivan’s Harvester is a palpable place. Its people are relatable and real. They carry burdens and they engage in kindness. Their bones bend with the hills ... Read the full review
From satirizing the mechanics of the American workplace to discovering motherly devotion in the myth of Persephone, Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection Buried Alive: A To-Do List takes readers through caves and coffins alike, showing what living things still kick inside the previously presumed-dead ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
Empty Words Book Jacket
Organized as a series of handwriting exercises, Empty Words offers a look inside a novelist’s mind as he attempts to improve himself by improving his handwriting. Originally published in 1996 in Spanish, it is Levrero’s first novel translated into English. Annie McDermott, who introduces English language readers to Levrero, has translated other works from Spanish and Portuguese, and her translations have appeared in many places, including Granta, the White Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, and World Literature Today ... Read the full review
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Cover art for The Way Through the Woods
I bought Long Litt Woon’s The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning for the promise embedded in the premise. How would Woon make her way back into the world after the shocking, sudden death of the fifty-four-year-old husband with whom she had spent all her adult years? What do mushrooms have to do with recovering from such a loss? Does anybody ever actually recover? ... Read the full review
Art Can Help Book Jacket
“[I]f you begin with an idea you’re usually beat before you start,” writes Robert Adams in Art Can Help, as he tries to imagine Edward Ranney photographing the Canyon del Muerto, and, so, here I begin, having been holding this slender silver volume in my hand all afternoon, interrupted only by the sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower and the smell of some ambient spray paint. (A long sentence, a beginning.) ... Read the full review
Bloody Seoul jacket art
To Rocky, the city of Seoul is truly something to behold. Sprawling skyscrapers dare to kiss the sky, thousands of lights rival the sun at night, and millions of people bustle through at any given moment, while the Han River remains a calm force through it all. And it will soon be his to rule, just like his father, the leader of the city’s most notorious gang, Three Star Pa. However, despite Rocky being the sole heir and next in line to become the big boss, his father refuses to turn the gang over to him ... Read the full review
Cover art for Max Havelaar
Max Havelaar is likely an unfamiliar title to most American readers, and the Netherlands in general is an often overlooked source of literature. But make no mistake: the world over holds Max Havelaar in high regard. I recently had the chance to talk to a born-and-raised Dutchman, and I asked him if the title rang any bells. "Of course," he told me. "It's a classic, everyone reads it." Think along the lines of Pride and Prejudice. In his short but poignant introduction to this edition of the novel, Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer makes the bold claim that Max Havelaar is one of the most important novels of all time. There's a reason this novel caught the attention of writers like Karl Marx and Thomas Mann, and there's a reason that when Freud drew up a list of ten great authors, Multatuli stood on top ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
Passing for Human cover art
Liana Finck wants to be seen. In creating Passing for Human, a graphic memoir and her second full-length work, she constructs her life story as Leola, and in doing so fantastically reimagines her youth and early adulthood in a quest to be seen and heard—by peers, by readers, and by herself ... Read the full review
Cover art for I and You
Many of the characters in J. David Stevens’s four-story collection I and You are Chinese immigrants; the author himself is not. In the book’s introduction, Stevens confides that he might never have written about these characters if not for the relationship with his wife Janet, whose ancestors left China in 1899 and later settled in Richmond, Virginia. Reflecting on the source material for his multi-generational narratives, Stevens, whose Mexico is Missing and Other Stories won the 2006 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction, admits an apprehension of the age: “[A] part of me still wonders if such stories cross a line, if appropriating segments of our shared history—or Janet’s history alone—is more rightly suited to intimate dialogue. I worry the art is too opportunistic.” This concern is real, and the author is right to acknowledge it. But his outsider’s rendition of the Chinese immigrant experience is respectfully nuanced, and while he does not share the same cultural background as his protagonists, he deeply values their stake in the larger human dilemma that fiction is taxed to solve ... Read the full review
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Jacket Cover for Your Strange Fortune
I first encountered Chloe N. Clark through her prose, but even then, it was clear to me that she was a poet. Her work often feels multimodal in form, something that shines as a written text but that also seems eager to be performed aloud. Her debut collection Your Strange Fortune is no different, full of rich and devastating moments, each poem stretching with fresh life on the page or on the air. Some of these poems also function as works of visual art, such as “Flora and Fauna of the Outer Rings,” embodying their meaning in shape as well as word ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
Jacket cover for The Book of X
“I was born a knot like my mother and her mother before her,” Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel begins, drawing readers into Cassie’s life story, The Book of X. “Picture three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.” ... Read the full review
Jacket cover for GREEN TARGET
In her latest work, Green Target, Tina Barr prods at the simultaneously tumultuous and cooperative relationship between humanity and nature, writing from her cabin in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Barr blends the intimate details of personal existence with the macrocosmic scope of collective human experience, cleverly balancing comfort and misery. Barr’s poetry harmonizes the intersecting lives she details, whether they be animal, botanical, or human. All is seen and accounted for through her kaleidoscopic vision in which events, objects and people are constantly shape-shifting, bleeding into each other, losing their original form, becoming targets for Barr’s eye-opening observations ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
Jacket cover 99 Names of Exile
99 Names of Exile begins in landscape. In the absence of the body of a deceased loved one, the book’s first poem “Invention of Country” searches for  a buried “uniform/ in a chest camouflaged as a scarab, its wings latched.” The poem goes on to ruminate on memories and details the speaker wishes they could conjure in the face of death, but cannot. Perhaps inspired by this loss of detail and still searching for a path to grief and intimacy, the speaker explains “I don’t trust flat surfaces” and “I know the earth is round, and if we continue falling,/ the afternoon’s revolution never grows cold.” ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
jacket cover for Berlin Alexanderplatz
A thought experiment: imagine that back during the peak prosperity years of the Obama Administration, with optimism at a high and unemployment dropping, that the good Dr. Oliver Sacks had unexpectedly published a despairing novel featuring a one-armed murdering pimp with white-supremacist leanings named Frank Beaverbrains. This dull petty criminal wanders Manhattan—or some gentrifying urban center of high culture and national pride—selling tie stands and alt-right newsletters, roughing up prostitutes, shooting up bars, and volunteering for a number of disastrous heists before winding up a diminished nobody, an assistant porter at a small company with less than nothing left to him. The reading public, scandalized, intrigued, mystified, lines up at bookstores nationwide to make this strange novel a bestseller. Some years later, Trump rides a surge of white nationalism to the White House, earning the author a reputation as a kind of literary-political clairvoyant ... Read the full review
Within the first few pages of The Real Sky by Valerie Fox and Jacklynn Niemiec we meet a theatrical tour guide in a haunted town, a man named Andrew who might turn into someone else at the end of the day, and a mother, covered in plaster, who walks into a field and never returns. Valerie Fox’s hybrid writing in The Real Sky is unexpected and surreal ... Read the full review
Worthy of love book jacket
Andre Fenton’s heartful debut novel Worthy of Love follows Adrian as he struggles not only with his weight, but with his own sense of self-worth. Candid, earnest, and full of emotion, Fenton gives us a unique yet personal story about one journey toward self-love ... Read the full review
PRESSURE DRESSING book jacket
It is a pleasure when a poet weds mind and heart in equal measure. Poets who tend toward innovation are often peremptorily classified by critics and readers as cerebral, the commenter overemphasizing surface play and failing to perceive—much less value—the emotional qualities they bring to their work. Thus ersatz schools and confederacies looser than that of Jefferson Davis come into being ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
The Fire Lit & Nearing Book Jacket
J.G. McClure’s long-awaited first collection of poetry, The Fire Lit & Nearing meditates on the loss of romantic love and walks through darkness for an answer. McClure refuses, and simultaneously attempts, to mend himself on these pages ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
FAREWELL, AYLIS: A NON-TRADITIONAL NOVEL IN THREE WORKS by Akram Aylisl, translated by Katherine E. Young, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
We don’t often read literature from Azerbaijan, for many reasons. It’s a small post-Soviet country that is hard to find on the map, with a Turkic language that makes finding translators difficult, and a government that still censors its writers Soviet-style. We don’t generally stroll down the aisle at a bookstore and discover the “Azeri” section. The only thing harder to find might be Georgian, and I’ll only say “might.” Probably most of us have no idea what novelists in Azerbaijan write about, what kind of social justice concerns they have, or what kind of risks those writers take to address those concerns ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
OPTIC NERVE, a novel by Maria Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead, reviewed by Justin Goodman
Written from the perspective of an unnamed Argentinian art critic, Optic Nerve flits from her present to her childhood memories, to her culture’s memories, in order to develop a lineage between self and cultural artifacts, become an optic nerve transmitting information from the external to the internal. The most representative instance of this transmission takes the form of a historical moment remembered by the narrator: while Señora Alvear, “once upon a time the famous soprano Regina Pacini,” sits at her dinner table beneath a painting by French animal painter Alfred de Dreux, “her eye travels back and forth constantly between the deer in the picture, still alive, and the other one, dead and served to them in lean cuts.” Optic Nerve spends much of its time traveling back and forth like this ... Read the full review
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ALL THE FIERCE TETHERS, essays by Lia Purpura, reviewed by David Grandouiller
It’s hard to find communion with a living thing in winter. Anyone with a burrow crawls in, wraps their tail around their eyes. The other night, when snow had just started falling, I braved the interstate on my way to another city, to share a friend’s burrow. Some black ice spun me around, and I slid off the road, stopped in the median, my tread marks looping back through the new snow like a confused shadow. I’m fine, thanks. I didn’t turn around, kept driving, couldn’t bear missing a chance not to be alone. The car’s fine, too, just brown all over from the dirt I scooped up. I haven’t washed it yet. I like chauffeuring dirt around the city, an unanswered text message from the world of matter: I’m still here ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
STARVATION MODE, a chapbook memoir by Elissa Washuta, reviewed by Michelle Crouch
Originally released as an E-book by Instant Future in 2015, essayist Elissa Washuta’s Starvation Mode is now reborn in corporeal chapbook form. At 50 pages, it can be read in one sitting, and I recommend this approach for best absorption of its nutrients. Nutrients, numbers, rules—Washuta is constantly searching for a calculus that will solve the problem of what goes into the body: “I would like to return to a time before it got so hard to eat,” she writes in the chapbook’s opening, “but eating has always been the hardest work I’ve ever had to do.” ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: INTIMATE HISTORIES OF SOCIAL UPHEAVAL, nonfiction by Saidiya Hartman, reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
What is a free life? This seemingly simple question is, of course, anything but simple. Theorizing a possibility of a free life with a recognition of the various structural oppressions in society is a challenge brought to vivid life in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
ECHO NORTH, a young adult novel by Joanna Ruth Meyer, reviewed by Rachel Hertzberg
Joanna Ruth Meyer’s second YA novel, Echo North, opens with a classic fairytale premise: Echo, who was attacked as a small child by a wolf, is scorned by her village because of the brutal scars on her face. When her father remarries, the cruel new stepmother takes every opportunity to let Echo know just how ugly and worthless she is ... Read the full review
ALL FOR NOTHING, a novel by Walter Kempowski, reviewed by Tyson Duffy
Every self-professed American optimist should read the oeuvre of Walter Kempowski—not that they ever will. The chronicler of brutality was never given a fair shake even by his fellow Germans, and despite strong book sales, by literary award committees. Kempowski had plenty of reasons to be angry—angry at his Nazi father whom he betrayed, at what the agonized Sebastian Haffner once called the “moral inadequacy of the German character,” at the literary world for snubbing him, and at every center of power involved in WWII: the Russians, British, Germans, Europe itself. The triumphant Soviets—without whom WWII could not have been won—were responsible for imprisoning Kempowski as well as his innocent and elderly mother ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
Book cover for Besotted
Melissa Duclos’ debut novel Besotted is a lyrical, urgent love story about two young American women, Sasha and Liz, who run away to China to try to find themselves. Sasha has fled all the trappings of her privileged life, including her father who disapproves of her sexuality. Liz, the object of Sasha’s desire, has packed up and left her predictable existence and Amherst-educated boyfriend, having grown tired of being an afterthought of his otherwise-enchanted life ... Read the full review
ROOM FOR GRACE, a memoir by Maureen and Daniel Kenner, reviewed by Colleen Davis
Grief is a waiting room with broken blinds. Cracks in the slats reveal some light outside, but since the pulleys won’t move, it’s impossible to know when—or if—the sun will shine on us again. The first time you lose a parent, this room feels strange and its shadows thwart your compass.  Like death itself, you’ve been told that grief brings anguish ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
ADIÓS TO MY PARENTS, a novel by Héctor Aguilar Camín, reviewed by Kim Livingston
Adiós To My Parents is a universal family story. Although the setting (Mexico, Belize, Guatemala) is unfamiliar to me—I’ve lived in the Chicago suburbs all of my fifty-one years and, regrettably, have taken only one Spanish class—the people in this book are so richly drawn that I know them instantly ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, translation /
A STAB IN THE DARK, poems  by Facundo Bernal, reviewed by Johnny Payne
One imagines this first existing as a notebook, non-committal if tending toward provisional completion, then, as Stein might put it, becoming what it became. In his most explosive work, Trilce, César Vallejo’s more formally complex poems are not necessarily more ambitious than those done in prose, in which he tends to offer greater immediate clarity, yet equal force. In fact, some of these explorations are more heightened and exploratory than the often-sentimental and casually conventional Human Poems ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM, nonfiction by Timothy Snyder, reviewed by Susan Sheu
Since 2016, many journalists—as well as academic, political, and literary writers—have been sounding the alarm about the future of American democracy. The writers trying to shake Americans out of their manifest-destiny stupor are a diverse cast, ranging from activists who wouldn’t hesitate to label themselves members of “the resistance,” like New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow, to people like David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, who is still reviled by many on the left for his role promoting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
I’M FINE. HOW ARE YOU? a chapbook by Catherine Pikula, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
A few days after I finished Catherine Pikula’s chapbook I’m Fine. How are You? I read the following sentence: “I would like to make a book out of crumpled-up pieces of paper: you start a sentence, it doesn’t work and you throw the page away. I’m collecting a few … maybe this is, in fact, the only literature possible today.” The sentence came in the last hundred pages of The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. And while the “today” referenced above was Italy in the 1960s, the description was oddly reminiscent of the small, thread-bound chapbook published in 2018 that I’d recently put down, I’m Fine. How Are You? ... Read the full review
SACRED DARKNESS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE GULAG, a narrative by Levan Berdzenishvili, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
“As with any book, my book had its own special fate—it was born by mistake,” claims Levan Berdzenishvili, in the opening chapter of Sacred Darkness. Levan wakes up in a hospital, sick and disoriented, with a high fever. He realizes he has some debts to pay before he can jaunt off to Hades. Levan is a specialist in Greek literature, so he doesn’t talk of “dying.” He refers to “my departure to Hades.” ... Read the full review
THE BAREFOOT WOMAN, a novel by by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed by Rebecca Entel
The Barefoot Woman opens with the author’s mother, Stefania, imparting knowledge to her daughters. “Often in the middle of one of those never-ending chores that fill a woman’s day,” Mukasonga writes, “(sweeping the yard, shelling and sorting beans, weeding the sorghum patch, tilling the soil, digging sweet potatoes, peeling and cooking bananas…), my mother would pause and call out to us.” Much of the book proceeds from this image: we learn the details of her mother’s life and rituals through her endless work and we learn the kinds of things passed down from a Tutsi mother to her daughter—one of only two of eight children to survive the 1994 Rwandan genocide ... Read the full review
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A DANGER TO HERSELF AND OTHERS, a young adult novel by Alyssa Sheinmel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
A Danger to Herself and Others is a wonderful, suspenseful read that does more than just tell a riveting story. The book opens the door to a larger narrative and seeks to cultivate compassion and understanding toward other, real-life stories just like Hannah’s ... Read the full review
RE-, poems by Andrea Blancas Beltran, reviewed by Hope Fischbach
Andrea Blancas Beltran, associate editor of MIEL, experimental poet, and proud fronteriza, made her chapbook debut in July 2018 with the poetry collection Re-. In it, Beltran stitches together a brimming handful of nostalgic recollections, inviting the reader to ponder the role of memory, the eerie beauty of forgotten things, and depth of emotion that can be found in everyday life ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
PANIC YEARS, a novel by Daniel DiFranco, reviewed by Allegra Armstrong
Panic Years, Daniel Difranco’s debut novel, is a hyper realistic account of a band on tour. Told from the perspective of laconic Paul, Panic Years follows indie bandmates Paul, Laney, Gooch, Jeff and later Drix across the country’s dive bars and clubs. “I’d joined Qualia because they were a good band with a shit-ton of underground buzz,” Paul muses on page five, setting the band’s intention for the rest of the tour: build Qualia’s indie fame to a record deal, or some serious label recognition ... Read the full review
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NARRATOR, a novel by Bragi Ólafsson, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron
Narrator is brief and quirky, rich and absurd, metatextual and extremely simple. It’s a walking narrative (in reality, a stalking narrative), which means it depends upon the motion of the narrator in order to go anywhere in particular. However, this book’s range is only within the mind; Aron’s and G.’s movements throughout Reykjavik are completely uninteresting, encompassing mostly pubs and shops of little consequence. But G.’s thoughts circle neurotically around his family, his failures, and Aron’s ex-girlfriend, Sara, for whom G. pined. In this way, and others, the vertical dimensions of the book are much more compelling than its movements through horizontal space ... Read the full review
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PRETEND WE LIVE HERE, stories by Genevieve Hudson, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
“College people like getting greens with soil still on the stems. It makes them feel real in a world made mostly of plastic and propane.” This is what the first narrator, a 13-year-old Alabaman girl with a rotten tooth, tells the reader in Genevieve Hudson’s debut collection of short stories, Pretend We Live Here. This type of humor and keen observation peppers the entire collection of fifteen stories ... Read the full review
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THE FEMALES by Wolfgang Hilbig reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
The Females was my first encounter with the late writer Wolfgang Hilbig, who grew up in East Germany and was allowed to move to the West in the mid-80s. He died in 2007 and was buried in Berlin. Isabel Fargo Cole has been translating his work for twenty years now. She started working to gain Hilbig an English-speaking audience before his death, and The Females, from Two Lines Press, is her sixth Hilbig work ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
BITTER ORANGE, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
Part of the pleasure in following an author, as I have followed Claire Fuller from her first novel to her latest, Bitter Orange, is coming to recognize her voice, even without a title page. Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons introduced me to Fuller’s eerie, ironically rendered English countryside of dark forests and haunted seaside villages, and to her characters held captive by lies. From novel to novel I’ve admired how she uses intelligent but naïve narrators to withhold information from the reader, sustaining unnerving suspense while signaling dissonance beneath the well-mannered surface. At this point, I’ll eagerly read anything she writes. And Bitter Orange is her best book yet ... Read the full review
EVERYDAY MADNESS: On Grief, Anger, Loss, and Love, a memoir by Lisa Appignanesi, reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
Lisa Appignanesi’s latest book comes at a time in which most of us regularly feel beside ourselves in what she describes as an “everyday madness.” She devotes herself to describing this mundane madness, something which could be called trauma but is experienced by almost everyone, in three manifestations ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
SLEEPING DRAGONS, stories by Magela Baudoin, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron
Thank goodness Magela Baudoin’s first book to be translated in English, Sleeping Dragons, is so short. The fifteen stories in this collection (adding up to only 140 pages) are so precise, bursting with such potency, that to increase the collection to 200 or 250 pages would just about kill the average reader. Nearly all the stories are perfectly formed, energetic little spheres—like new tennis balls, popping with their own elasticity the moment they drop out of the canister—and only so many of these spheres can hit a reader between the eyes before she must stop, dazed. The overall impression is of a writer with years of craftsmanship already behind her, ready to don the halo of South American literary fame ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
PORTRAIT OF A BODY IN WRECKAGES, poems by Meghan McClure, reviewed by Claire Oleson
Excellent writing is often lauded for its ability to transport and disembody the reader, to enrapture so completely that its audience floats along the sentence and forgets their place in the room. Meghan McClure’s Portrait of a Body in Wreckages does not do this, instead, much of its excellence is found in its proficiency to embody the reader, to address them in their own physicality, and move along the level of the cell as well as the sentence ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS, stories by Chaya Bhuvaneswar, reviewed by K.C. Mead-Brewer
Chaya Bhuvaneswar is part of a unique legacy of writer-physicians—Nawal El Saadawi, William Carlos Williams, Anton Chekhov, to name a few—and the unexpected harmony of these pursuits is showcased throughout her collection White Dancing Elephants, winner of the 2017 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize. Written with a straightforward, refreshingly uncluttered voice, these stories center on the urgent human desire to heal and be healed ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
AFTER THE WINTER, a novel by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
At the beginning of Guadalupe Nettel’s newly translated novel After the Winter, twenty-five-year-old Cecilia moves from her native Oaxaca to Paris. She arrives there without the usual image of Paris as a “city where dozens of couples of all ages kissed each other in parks and on the platforms of the métro, but of a rainy place where people read Cioran and La Rochefoucauld while, their lips pursed and preoccupied, they sipped coffee with no milk and no sugar.” ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
BOOT LANGUAGE, a memoir by Vanya Erickson, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
The paradox in writing a postmodern memoir is that the author must somehow convince readers she’s telling the truth—typically by admitting to subjectivity and fallible memory, and by interrogating her version of events. But that’s not the strategy Vanya Erickson employs in her post-WWII coming-of-age story, Boot Language. With vivid detail and some implausibly long passages of remembered dialogue, she presents herself as the sole reliable narrator of her life in California, where she was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father and a mother who failed to protect her (but did “soften Dad’s blows” with inherited money) ... Read the full review
STRANGE WEATHER IN TOKYO, a novel by Hiromi Kawakami, reviewed by August Thompson
The motor of Strange Weather is the slow love that builds between Tsukiko and Sensei. At a neighborhood bar, they run into each other after decades of absence. Maybe at another time they would have exchanged pleasantries and moved along. But they are both living in the same kind of underwater blue. They chat and find that their language is the same. They start to build an intimacy without schedule, running into each other at the bar, sharing meals and drinks, telling simple stories, laughing at their inconsistencies ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
CARTOON DIALECTICS, a series by Tom Kaczynski, reviewed by Julia Alekseyeva
The Cartoon Dialectics series collects work that Tom Kaczynski has published in anthologies since 2005. Kaczynski is perhaps best known for being the publisher of comics imprint Uncivilized Books, an independent press that has published works by Gabrielle Bell, David B., and Noah Van Sciver. As the title Cartoon Dialectics suggests, Kaczynski’s own work straddles the line between comics and philosophy; he weaves together reflections on culture and critical theory with memoir and memory ... Read the full review
graphic narrative reviews, reviews /
HORSEMEN OF THE SANDS, two novellas by Leonid Yuzefovich, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
The translation initiative Read Russia characterizes Leonid Yuzefovich as a writer whose books “gray the lines between faction and fiction,” using historical figures and settings in his work. “Faction” is for artful historians (or for historian artists, perhaps), writers who know how to be suspicious of fictionalizing, but also know that history is never just facts. This description of Yuzefovich makes sense, since he is a historian by training and taught history for many years, but has emerged as an influential contemporary fiction writer in Russia ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
ELEANOR, OR THE REJECTION OF THE PROGRESS OF LOVE, a novel by Anna Moschovakis, reviewed by John Spurlock
Anna Moschovakis’ debut novel Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love is a searching and poignant work that deftly positions itself between the unspeakable specificity of personal experience and the disturbing surplus of fungible narratives in our online world. The writing feels brave in both its formal approach and its openness to the potentially divergent conclusions it may suggest ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
BASIC BLACK WITH PEARLS, a novel by Helen Weinzweig, reviewed by Jodi Monster
Lola Montez, the protagonist of Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig, is a woman gripped by an obsessive, consuming passion for her married lover, Coenraad. To hear Lola tell it, this mysterious man, who works for an unspecified outfit referred to only as “The Agency,” directs her to their assignations by means of a secret code he embeds into the text of National Geographic magazine articles ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
The title of Nova Ren Suma’s gripping new book, A Room Away from the Wolves, refers to its central location, but also to an unobtainable promise: a place where a girl can go to be truly safe. This novel resists easy categorizations. Not just a ghost story, not just a coming-of-age story, A Room Away from the Wolves will leave readers questioning the notion of safety in a world where the most dangerous enemy is one’s own past—and double-checking dark corners of the bedroom before going to sleep ... Read the full review
THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, a novel by Carlo Collodi, reviewed by Beth Kephart
If Disney’s Pinocchio is an affable, pliable ingénue who was reconfigured, according to the lore, to look more like a boy than a puppet, Collodi’s is an anti-hero—a wooden thing with barely any ears who mostly can’t see beyond his own nose, no matter its current proportion. He is persistent, insistent, impossible, exasperating, willfully obtuse, a regular screw-up. You don’t have to stretch to note the parallels that dominate our news cycle. Donald J. Trump was prefigured more than 130 years ago. He was augured by a satirist who was most supremely skilled in imagining poor, and poorly curbed, behavior ... Read the full review
LIFE DURING WARTIME, a novel by Katie Rogin, reviewed by Isabelle Mongeau
Katie Rogin’s debut novel, Life During Wartime, presents the struggle that soldiers, and their families, face adjusting back to civilian life. The story begins when 21-year-old Nina Wicklow, home from duty in Iraq, goes missing in a small town outside of Los Angeles ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
A new novel, Mina, written by Kim Sagwa and translated from Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, attempts to chronical adolescences, a transformative time of life, but in the context of a world that does not condone individuality, experimentation, or choice. Through unconventional characters, a high-pressure setting, and an unapologetic directness that is both off-putting and enthralling, Kim creates an entirely different kind of teenage drama. By placing three emotional, confused young people in a world of restraint and hidden suffering, she ignites an explosion of a story that is entirely new. It does not have the charming humor of John Green or the contrariety of J.D. Salinger. Instead, it is an immensely serious and angry portrayal of a teenage breakdown ... Read the full review
COMEMADRE, a novel by Roque Larraquy, reviewed by Justin Goodman
There is a plant “whose sap produces […] microscopic animal larvae” that can consume rats “from the inside out.” It can only be found on “Thompson Island, a small landmass in Tierra Del Fuego,” within Argentinian screenwriter Roque Larraquy’s debut novel Comemadre—the name of this plant of spontaneous generation. Translated in the novel as “motherseeker or mothersicken,” this fictitious plant and its larvae symbolize the dual powers of violence to create and destroy. First as crime, then as art ... Read the full review
DEEP CAMOUFLAGE, poems by Amy Saul-Zerby, reviewed by Mike Corrao
Amy Saul-Zerby’s new collection, Deep Camouflage is the manifestation of heartbreak. It is the fables that spawn from moments of empathy and melancholy. It is the conversation that a poet has with their reader. More than most poetry collections, Saul-Zerby’s is a sequence that asks to be read all at once ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
LOVE, HATE and OTHER FILTERS, a young adult novel by Samira Ahmed, reviewed by Leticia Urieta
Maya Aziz sees her world through a camera lens. “One thing I’ve learned,” she says, “People love a camera, and when I’m filming, they see it, not me, so whenever I need to, I can disappear behind my trusty shield.” She is often the observer, experiencing her life on the outside looking in. As the novel opens, Maya is at a crossroads: she has been accepted to NYU’s prestigious filmmaking program, but her traditional Indian Muslim parents want her to go to school in Chicago, within reach of their influence and protection ... Read the full review
KATALIN STREET, a novel by Magda Szabó, reviewed by William Morris
Four children play together in a quiet neighborhood. The children are Henriette Held, the young daughter of a Jewish dentist; the Elekes sisters, Irén and Blanka; and Bálint Temes, the handsome son of the Major. Their game is Cherry Tree, in which they all sing and spin in circles, and one of the children “chooses” another, the one they love. In this innocent game, the girls invariably choose Bálint, and each girl develops her own particular feelings for the boy; when it is his turn to choose, though, Bálint always prefers Irén, the oldest and most serious of the three. This is one of the earliest memories shared by the Elekes, Temes, and Held families, who form a lifelong, tragic bond in Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street ... Read the full review
NEVER ANYONE BUT YOU, a novel by Rupert Thomson, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
With quiet skill and rich description, Rupert Thomson strings the lives of two eclectic lovers through the tumultuous history of Paris and the Channel Islands during and between the two World Wars ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
CUBIST STATES OF MIND/NOT THE CRUELEST MONTH, poems by Marc Jampole, reviewed by Alessio Franko
Whereas his previous book references artists, movements, historical figures, and myths, Jampole has made the bold choice here to work from two overarching cultural touchstones. Rather than searching for the vocabulary it shares with the reader, Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month undertakes the creation of a new such vocabulary altogether. The result is two series of poems that sit on the edge between the particular and the universal, the everyday and the extraordinary, the true and the beautiful ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
THEY WERE BEARS, poems by Sarah Marcus, reviewed by Nathan O. Ferguson
The poems in Sarah Marcus’ book, They Were Bears follow a young woman, the speaker of most of the poems, who pursues discovery and sensation in the remote corners of the American wilderness. The narrative shapes this wilderness into a wide-open expanse characterized by uncertainty, wonder, and menace. The backdrop also shifts from unpeopled natural settings to the speaker’s agricultural childhood home and to the industrial sprawl of Cleveland. The book’s three untitled segments each alternate between lyric poems and prose poems, and all use bears and other animals as central to their imagery and symbolism. Poems in the book discuss a variety of themes, including family, sexuality, and womanhood. The primary foci of the work as a whole, however, seem to be overcoming trauma and embracing nature. Together, the poems tell the story of a woman defined by her passion and resilience in the face of a harrowing past ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
GASLIGHT: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century, essays by Joachim Kalka, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron
With a title and subtitle like Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century, the reader will be forgiven for thinking Joachim Kalka’s book is a collection of visual art. It is not. Though it does contain a handful of visual descriptions, it bears not one illustration, woodcut, or photograph. No lantern slides, and no visual depictions of gaslight. What it has instead are words, many of them, artfully arranged. Kalka’s words, assembled into eleven essays and a preface, are densely packed and remarkably pointed. Although his purpose is to glance back at the nineteenth century, not to historicize it, or even to theorize about it with a particular agenda, Kalka is a highly organized thinker. His insights prove scintillating, if specialized ... Read the full review
AARDVARK TO AXOLOTL, essays by Karen Donovan and TALES FROM WEBSTER’S, essays by John Shea, reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch
Karen Donovan’s Aardvark to Axolotl and John Shea’s Tales from Webster engage with this paradox via the dictionary, that great alphabetizer of language. The dictionary is the reference-book-of-all-reference-books. It is writing broken down to its most basic components, as a color wheel separates out the most basic tools of the painter. It also makes for dry reading. As far as plots go, it’s lackluster ... Read the full review
DIFFICULT WOMEN, a memoir by David Plante, reviewed by Susan Sheu
Acclaimed writer David Plante’s book, published originally in 1983, is an account of his friendships with three women central to the artistic and intellectual world of the 1970s. It is a rare act of memoir writing to describe oneself as the shadowy sidekick to other, presumably greater and more interesting characters. In nonfiction writing classes, this point of view would be discouraged ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
IVORY PEARL, a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
Ivory Pearl is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s final and unfinished novel, now available in an English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Manchette was known during his lifetime for his 1970s crime novels, noir that gained popular movie adaptations and made him a standard among French crime writers. This translation features endnotes on how Manchette envisioned the novel ending, and an introduction written by Manchette’s son, Doug Headline, which is as affectionate as it is informative ... Read the full review
TART HONEY, poems by Deborah Burnham, reviewed by Claire Oleson
Divided into four sections, Deborah Burnham’s poetry collection Tart Honey seems cut into citrus slices— edible, organic, and aware of some lost and bodily whole it re-composes in the formation of its parts. The poems feature modern relationships with too much absence, a dissolving picture of Apollo 13 soon taken over by a persona attempting to collect her body into experiencing her partner, and paintings with colors that spill into cells, among other simultaneously harmonizing and divisive images ... Read the full review
THE JUNIPER TREE, a novel by Barbara Comyns, reviewed by Allegra Armstrong
The Juniper Tree is a mid-twentieth-century retelling of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name, though Barbara Comyns has made the story all her own. Originally published in 1985, The Juniper Tree tells the story of Bella Winter, the unwed mother of a biracial daughter, through her quest to live life on her own terms in a world where she is patently disapproved of for being who she is ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
THE KREMLIN BALL, a novel by Curzio Malaparte, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
In his introductory comments for The Kremlin Ball, Curzio Malaparte claims that his novel is “a faithful portrait of the USSR’s Marxist nobility.” Such a thing should be anachronistic: a Marxist nobility? A communist high society? But that is exactly what Malaparte, as the novel’s narrator, is describing ... Read the full review
Two Poetry Chapbooks from Doublecross Press reviewed by Rachael Guynn Wilson
Headlands Quadrats and It’s No Good Everything’s Bad speak to anyone who appreciates poetry, and lovingly handcrafted poetry chapbooks. Both works strike a delicate balance between lyric and narrative modes—the former leaning further into lyric and the latter into prose narrative. Headlands Quadrats will be especially notable to those with an abiding interest in ecopoetics, and It’s No Good Everything’s Bad to those drawn to feminist poetics, Marxism, and humor ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
TRICK by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner
The work of literary translators can be viewed as vital, especially given the forces of nationalism today, so it is no small matter that someone of Lahiri’s caliber has joined the ranks. For Starnone and his readers, it means his novel Trick arrives in English in mesmerizing form ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
PLAYING CATCH WITH STRANGERS, essays by Bob Brody, reviewed by Colleen Davis
Playing Catch with Strangers consists of a long series of short essays. Most were written for print or online publications and not originally intended as book chapters. They are clean, straightforward, and easy to read. They are also salutary—in the sense of promoting better mental health and positive emotions. Brody reminds us of the many gifts that life offers to those who pay it close attention ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
THE RADICAL ELEMENT: 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes, and Other Dauntless Girls, edited by Jessica Spotswood, reviewed by Maureen Sullivan
The Radical Element: 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes, and Other Dauntless Girls is an anthology of feminist fiction, celebrating what editor Jessica Spotswood calls in her introduction the “quiet badassery” of young heroines taking charge of their own identities. This collection is a follow-up to A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers, and other Badass Girls, also edited by Jessica Spotswood. Similar to the first volume, the pieces in The Radical Element span a wide range of historical time periods and geographic locations, from 1838 Georgia to 20th century Boston. A brief author’s note follows each story, with additional information on the historical context or the inspiration behind the work ... Read the full review
ADUA, a novel by Igiaba Scego, reviewed by Jodi Monster
The title character of Igiaba Scego’s novel Adua is a Somali woman caught in history’s crosshairs. Born to an ambitious, mercurial man, a translator who sold his skills to the Italians during Mussolini’s pre-WWII push to expand his African empire, Adua's life is shaped by choices she didn’t make and subject to forces she can’t control ... Read the full review
BAD JOBS AND POOR DECISIONS Dispatches from the Working Class, a memoir by J.R. Helton, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
The jacket of J.R. Helton’s memoir, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions: Dispatches from the Working Class, shows an assortment of loose black-and-white sketches: a marijuana leaf, a packet of cigarettes, a typewriter, crumpled beer cans, lines of (presumably) cocaine, a gun, a cockroach. Among them, figures emerge: A man’s face covered in huge beads of sweat, a woman with long dark hair shown from the shoulders up, a pole dancer. These images appear regularly in each of the seven long anecdotes that make up Bad Jobs, working as signifiers of a place, time, and social class. The place is Austin, Texas and the time is when the tail end of the 1970s met the Reagan 1980s ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
THE PRICE GUIDE TO THE OCCULT, a young adult novel by Leslye Walton, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck
For a novel about witches, magic, and family curses, Leslye Walton’s The Price Guide to the Occult has a lot to say about humanity. More than a century ago, a witch named Rona Blackburn landed on Anathema Island, where she was met with fear and vexation from the island’s founding families. Determined to rid their island of her “as the tide erases footprints in the sand,” they burned her home down. So she, naturally, cursed their entire bloodlines ... Read the full review
PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE, a memoir by Sharon Harrigan, reviewed by Brian Burmeister
Who we are is a complicated thing. Interactions influence perceptions, and perceptions influence memories. Having lost her father in a tragic accident when she was only seven, author Sharon Harrigan attempts to unravel the mystery of the man her father was in the powerful new memoir Playing with Dynamite. “I was relieved when he died,” her brother wrote her in an email. “It’s terrible to say, but it’s true.” ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
TOMB SONG, a novel by Julián Herbert, reviewed by Katharine Coldiron
What an odd book Tomb Song is. It contains prose both beautiful and profane, extensive self-awareness and a troubling level of self-ignorance. Its author and its narrator blur together into an entity that is never quite one or the other, and it doesn’t distinguish between fiction and nonfiction with especial meticulousness. That is, the narrator and the author have the same name, the same wife and child, the same job, and the same literary accomplishments. It remains undefined whether, in what passages, and to what extent Herbert has fictionalized his life to write this book, which a reviewer in a Chilean newspaper called “an elegy to his mother.” ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
SOMEDAY, SOMEWHERE, a young adult novel by Lindsay Champion, reviewed by Elaina Whitesell
Dominique, or Dom, seems to have nothing. She lives in Trenton, New Jersey with her single mother and helps run their Laundromat. When Dom and her best friend Cass embark on a field trip to New York City to see the students of the Brighton Conservatory perform at Carnegie Hall, Dom sees Ben for the first time ... Read the full review
NOTHING and DOTING, two novels by Henry Green, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
Henry Green is the pen name of English writer Henry Vincent Yorke, a well-educated man from a wealthy business family who wrote novels from 1926 to 1952, when Doting, his last work, was published. His works are considered important contributions to modernist literature, and he was well-respected by several authors at his time, including W. H. Auden and Anthony Burgess ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
NEST IN THE BONES: STORIES by Antonio Di Benedetto reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman
This collection showcases a number of wonderfully imaginative stories whose fanciful imagery remains in the reader’s mind long after he’s finished reading. Di Benedetto’s concise, intelligent stories are surely still a source of complicit delight. Anyone who reads Zama and is hungry for more of Di Benedetto’s work will enjoy pecking at the writer’s brain in Nest in the Bones ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
Any book that has a ringing endorsement on its cover from Elena Ferrante these days will merit a second look. But there is another, potentially more important endorsement of Neapolitan Chronicles—a silent endorsement on the part of the translators of this Italian story collection by Anna Maria Ortese, originally published in Italy in 1953 ... Read the full review
The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, a novel by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Jordan Stump, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
The classic coming-of-age novel tells the story of a young boy coming to terms with the man he is about to become. Over 175 years ago, the great French literary seer Honoré de Balzac composed a rather untraditional version: in his novel, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, Balzac applies the traditional arc of the bildungsroman to two female protagonists in order to present two ways of life—the passionate life and the tranquil life. In doing so, Balzac reminds readers of the elusive nature of happiness, regardless of one’s way of life, and what it means to love and be loved ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
[m]otherhood, stories by Anna Lea Jancewicz, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer
Anna Lea Jancewicz built up her editorial chops on magical flash fiction and fairytale non-fiction journals, like Cease, Cows and Tiny Donkey, before becoming Editor-in-Chief of Rabble Lit, a magazine dedicated to working-class literature. Some might consider this a strange artistic road, but it makes sense. Using the magic in the everyday to challenge and undermine the power of oppressors, magical realism emerges from anti-colonialism and protest. Similarly, the classic fairytale often elevates working-class heroines like Cindergirl and Vasilisa. Jancewicz’s debut collection builds on these traditions of artistic protest, offering a mix of flash and short stories steeped in both the brutal realities and dreamy magic of women’s lives. The combination of flash and short stories serves to create a heady ebb and flow throughout the collection, almost like a heartbeat ba-boom, ba-boom, a place where prayers, stories, and spells live side-by-side ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
Sometimes we read fiction to escape, to experience the art of writing, or to lose ourselves in plot. Non-fiction is often imagined the territory of learning, absorbing direct information on a topic. We often forget that fiction still has this power, to take you somewhere real you’ve never been, to introduce you to people you might not have otherwise met. Fiction can convey social realities and erode the “otherness” of others. Sometimes even when we set out to read to escape, to read for fun, we are confronted with truths about our world. But of course, true art about the human experience never eludes the social and the political ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
BIRTH OF A NEW EARTH: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism, a manifesto by Adrian Parr, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
When will we stop imaging climate change in the future and how can we reorient ourselves to this reality? Adrian Parr’s new academic work on climate change, Birth of a New Earth, attempts to answer this question by tapping into the recent trend of considering the positive, some might even say utopian, possibilities that the crisis of climate change allows. She argues, “Regardless of environmental harms and changes in climate impacting people differently, there remains a shared human experience of hardship that will intensify as time passes. For this reason, the environmental and climate crises contain the political potential to radically change social life so it evolves into a more equitable, inclusive, collaborative, and voluntary social system.” ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
TIME OF GRATITUDE, essays and poems by Gennady Aygi, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
Time of Gratitude is an unusual text: the collected pieces are both prose and poetry, some of them written for events and some written as personal reflection. Translator Peter France has organized the book into two sections. The first one is devoted to Russian and Chuvash writers and artists, including Boris Pasternak, Kazimir Malevich, Varlam Shalamov, and Chuvash poet Mikhail Sespel ... Read the full review
TRANSLATION AS TRANSHUMANCE, a book-length essay by Mireille Gansel, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube
For Mireille Gansel, the work of translation is an all-consuming task. Before embarking on a project, Gansel first immerses herself in the world of the poet she is translating. She studies the historical context of their writing as well as the personal context. Wherever possible, she engages with their physical environment: she visits their home, observes their writing space. And, ideally, she listens to the poet read their work aloud. Attempting to translate a single German word, “sensible,” in a poem by Reiner Kunze, Gansel travels from West to East Germany to “[listen] to the poet read, alert to his intonations and facial expressions. In the tiny blue kitchen, I was conscious of his precarious everyday life.” She imagines the letters from friends in exile that he’ll never receive, and the mingling of his two languages, a German abstracted by Nazism and a Czech repressed by war, both of which survive in the poetry of his contemporaries, in songs from his childhood. Here, in this intersection of past and present, Gansel finds the word for “sensible”: fragile ... Read the full review
AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, a novel by Tayari Jones, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck
Do Roy and Celestial have an ordinary American marriage? The title of Tayari Jones’ fourth novel implies that perhaps they do in fact have a quintessential American life, and in many ways they do… ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL, a novel by Dorthe Nors, reviewed by Brendan McCourt
Above all else, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a novelist’s novel. Literary-minded readers will revel in the novel’s allegorical framework extending anywhere from cautionary tale to failed bildungsroman to a metaphor of novel reading itself ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
BLACK GENEALOGY, poems  by Kiki Petrosino, reviewed by Claire Oleson
Situated between a national and a personal history, Kiki Petrosino’s poetry book Black Genealogy sifts through the past in search of lost identity, language, bodies, and self-possession amidst the legacy of the Civil War and slavery in America. The book details an exploration of both a familial and a larger American reality through the lens of a contemporary African American persona ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
HER BODIES AND OTHER PARTIES, stories by Carmen Maria Machado, reviewed by Rosie Huf
For those of us still traumatized by the 2016 Presidential election, the debut novel Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is the emotional and intellectual release for which we have been waiting. It is electric with the #Resist spirit. It underscores the importance of the #MeToo movement. And, it tackles issues such as gender, language, and human interaction through a fresh, folkloric perspective. Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, this collection of ten short stories is timeless, yet also a necessary way to transition from 2017 to 2018 ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
SCHLUMP, a novel by Hans Herbert Grimm, reviewed by Kelly Doyle
When Hans Herbert Grimm’s semi-autobiographical novel Schlump was published in 1928 alongside All Quiet on the Western Front, it was advertised as a “truthful depiction” of World War I. It is no surprise that Grimm took on the the pseudonym Schlump, just as his protagonist does, to hide his identity. As explained by Volker Weidermann in the afterward, Grimm “describe[s] the German soldiers of the Great War as less than heroic,” and “the entire war as a cruel, bad joke.” While this caused the Nazis to burn his book in 1933, today it gives the text, translated by Jamie Bulloch, a feeling of authenticity ... Read the full review
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LIGHT INTO BODIES, poems by Nancy Chen Long, reviewed by Trish Hopkinson
The poetry of Light into Bodies begins and ends with a theme of identity while its pages flutter with the imagery of egrets, pigeons, swans, and starlings. Nancy Chen Long presents the complexity of exploring identity from multiple perspectives—from the viewpoint of a mathematician, from a child whose mother repeatedly becomes the property of other men by the “generosity” of her own father, to a daughter’s experiences growing up in a multi-cultural home and discovering the nuances of relationships in adulthood. The poems stitch together an intricate lace of childhood memories, family stories, myth, and Asian-American experience with a thread of women’s issues intertwined throughout, each conflict woven within the next to create the speaker’s complicated identity ... Read the full review
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COLLUSION: SECRET MEETINGS, DIRTY MONEY, AND HOW RUSSIA HELPED DONALD TRUMP WIN, nonfiction by Luke Harding, reviewed by Susan Sheu
Reading Harding’s new book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, published in mid-November by Vintage Books, gives the sense that we are living in a John Le Carre novel where we are not certain that the West won the Cold War or that the Cold War ever ended. Collusion is a deep dive into the coverage of the administration and the crisscrossing lines of Russian money and influence ... Read the full review
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THE SCIENCE OF UNVANISHING OBJECTS, poems by Chloe N. Clark, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck
Completely mundane happenings take on significant meaning in Chloe N. Clark’s The Science of Unvanishing Objects. Everyday things like butterflies, telephones, and mirrors assume a role beyond their normal functions. Likewise, ordinary events such as conversations between strangers and seeing a lover naked for the first time become catalysts for a deeper understanding of the universe. Through her explorations, Clark repeatedly returns to loss, a major motif in this collection, which is amplified by recurring narratives centered on missing women ... Read the full review
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A WORKING WOMAN, a novel by Elvira Navarro, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
“She wanted […] the location of her madness to be now the location of her art.” This is how the narrator of The Working Woman analyzes her roommate, but the same can be said of the narrator herself, and perhaps as well of the only figure in this postmodernist novel who actually “speaks:” the author, Elvira Navarro. The text becomes the conjunction of madness and art, which share one abstract and yet delineated “location,” madness needing expression through art, or art uniquely poised to express madness ... Read the full review
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DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR, a novel by Anca L. Szilágyi, reviewed by Leena Soman
Tatiana is supposed to spend the summer before her junior year in high school in Vermont with her only friend while her mother summers in Rome. Instead, she hitches a ride from her boarding school’s Connecticut campus to Brooklyn. It’s 1980, and Tatiana renames herself Pluta, an alter ego she has long cultivated to meet the demands of this adventure. So begins Anca L. Szilágyi’s debut novel Daughters of the Air ... Read the full review
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MALACQUA, a novel by Nicola Pugliese, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
Anyone who picks up And Other Stories’ edition of Malacqua, the first English translation of Nicola Pugliese’s Italian novel from 1977, will be immediately alerted to the strange weather which serves as the novel’s catalyst. Emblazoned across the book’s cover is Malacqua’s unofficial subtitle: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event. Before even opening the book, the reader is clued into Pugliese’s supreme fascinations: water and Naples. And of course, the collision of the two ... Read the full review
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PETITE FLEUR, a novel by Iosi Havilio, reviewed by August Thompson
Iosi Havilio’s Petite Fleur is a great book because it is a work of surprises intimately knotted around each other. The plot twists and writhes. Murders and magic lead to diatribes about jazz fusion that leads to rebirth and love and examinations of the anxiety of parenthood and marriage. The unexpected is constant, the satisfaction complete ... Read the full review
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CHEESUS WAS HERE, a young adult novel by J.C. Davis, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
In the small town of Clemency, Texas Sunday morning worship is even more important than Friday night football. With a population of 1,236 and only two churches in town, everyone looks forward to putting on their Sunday best and lifting the Lord’s name on high ... Read the full review
I’M THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY, a memoir by Andrea Jarrell, reviewed by Helen Armstrong
Reading Andrea Jarrell’s memoir felt like I was squatting in the bushes outside of her house, fingers perched on the windowsill, watching and listening as her life unfolded, taking comfort in her family’s dysfunctions which mirrored my own in asymmetric ways. Being from a dysfunctional family myself, I take some sick comfort from seeing crying children in grocery stores, their mothers looking like they’ve reached their wits’ end. I thrive on overhearing family fights in restaurants, because for so long, it was my family who were making heads turn. Once, at a rest stop in Delaware, my younger brother pelted my mother and I with chicken nuggets from the booth across the aisle while my father yelled at him, and ultimately, dragged him from the McDonald’s. I suspect most of our families are dysfunctional, and it’s the job of our adult selves to use all of that dysfunctional material we’re sitting on to become something good. That, or we allow the cycle to repeat. But how does one heal from childhood? How does one become better than our parents? These are central questions in Andrea Jarrell’s haunting memoir I’m the One Who Got Away ... Read the full review
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THE MINORS by Chris Ludovici reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
THE MINORS by Chris Ludovici Unsolicited Press, 376 pages reviewed by Ryan K. Strader Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports. A fastball travels at 90 miles per hour, moving from the pitcher’s mitt to the catcher’s glove in approximately .44 seconds. If the batter blinks, he’ll miss. For the last few feet that the ball travels, it is essentially invisible to the hitter. He has to have made his decision by then, whether to swing, how he’ll swing. I did not know anything about baseball when I picked up Chris Ludovici’s The Minors. Nick Rogers, one of the protagonists, reflects on the difficulty of hitting a baseball, and I ended up spending too much time engrossed in an ESPN Sport Science episode checking Nick’s information. It turns out that, football fanatic though I am, the fastball is a formidable opponent: 90 mph is a frightening, lethal speed, and statistically speaking, it is almost impossible to hit. However, when we meet Nick in The Minors, baseball is part of Nick’s past, thanks to a shoulder injury. Back home and living with an aunt, the 28-year-old Nick tries to forge ahead by working as a contractor ... Read the full review
A MYRIAD OF ROADS THAT LEAD TO HERE, a novella by Nathan Elias, reviewed by Kelly Doyle
Nathan Elias’ first novella, A Myriad of Roads that Lead to Here, tells a story that is simultaneously frustrating and accessible. This bildungsroman provides a snapshot into the emotional journey of a naive and sometimes selfish narrator, Weston, as he grapples with the untimely death of his mother, which had occurred a few months before ... Read the full review
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KONUNDRUM: SELECTED PROSE OF FRANZ KAFKA by Franz Kafka reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman
With the centenary of Franz Kafka’s first three major publications having passed just a few years ago, a plethora of new translations of Kafka’s stories have recently been released. Among them is Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, with works chosen and translated by Peter Wortsman, a writer known for his own micro fiction. Wortsman’s selection of what he considers to be the very best of Kafka’s short prose, whether it’s a story, a letter, a journal entry, a parable, or an aphorism distinguishes Konundrum from the other new translations. This approach contrasts with the single book-length work of Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis” and Michael Hofmann’s new translation of all of Kafka’s unpublished stories in Investigations of a Dog ... Read the full review
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GODS ON THE LAM, a novel by Christopher David Rosales, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck
Christopher David Rosales, on the dedication page, describes Gods on the Lam as “an homage to Roger Zelazny, without whose books I may never have been inspired to write.” Zelazny’s influence is evident. Famous for his direct execution and his penchant for genre-mixing, the lifeblood of the late speculative fiction author rushes through the twisty veins of this strange novel—Rosales’ second ... Read the full review
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BONE CONFETTI, poems by Muriel Leung, reviewed by Marilynn Eguchi
Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti is an open door into a house of mourning; an exceptional look into the aftermath of loss, and in turn, an examination of what it is to love someone. A challenging collection of lyric and prose poems, the poet manipulates the space where words are carefully placed and the space where there is nothing. The theme of the book is grief, and it is palpable. It is disorienting and enveloping, but manages to avoid being overly sentimental, allowing it to be both intimate and universal. The poet stated in an interview that “applying the role of politics to the personal grief of loss was very important work to do . . . It became a way of understanding this loss as tied to a history that’s larger than me.” ... Read the full review
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AFTERGLOW by Eileen Myles and THE STRANGERS AMONG US by Caroline Picard, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker
Dog people and cat people often like to stake their identities on the idea that they are starkly different from one another, but are they really so different? Regardless of species, a pet’s companion is a certain type of person who probably prefers their dog or cat to other people. In two recent books, by Eileen Myles and Caroline Picard, a dog person and a cat person, respectively, confess the closeness they feel to their pets while also marveling at the strangeness of intimacy with another kind of being. Reading both of these books together becomes a chance to deeply explore the intimate otherness of animal companionship. They live amongst us, but are they with us? ... Read the full review
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THE MASK OF SANITY, a novel by Jacob Appel, reviewed by Kelly Doyle
The protagonist of Jacob Appel’s 2017 novel, The Mask of Sanity, is a doctor, a family man, and a murderer. Appel offers a rare insight into the life of this high functioning sociopath, Dr. Jeremy Balint. With a staggering seven master's degrees, medical degree, law degree, and experience in clinical psychiatry, Appel is certainly authority enough to paint a convincing psychological profile of such a troubling protagonist. The close third person narration allows the reader to hear Balint’s twisted thoughts, while also observing and nearly falling victim to the carefully constructed facade of “the most ethican human being on the planet.” ... Read the full review
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THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK reviewed by Robert Sorrell
Reviewing Elizabeth Hardwick’s new collection of essays is a task to strike fear into the heart of even the most headstrong literary critic. Biographer of Melville, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, and noted sharp tongue, Elizabeth Hardwick cast a long shadow in the literary world of the twentieth century. Darryl Pinckney introduces Hardwick in this volume as a New York intellectual firebrand, an avant-garde thinker with an acerbic writing style, and a cutting, devastatingly smart critic who employed a withering gaze.  Would-be reviewers, if not scared off by Hardwick’s biography, will encounter an essay in the book’s first hundred pages, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which is destined to have some effect on their confidence. If reading that piece is not sufficient, the reviewer will then bump into a piece on a Hemingway biography that begins, “Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway is bad news.” To be blunt, Hardwick, a writer of fiction herself in addition to criticism and biography, does not go easy on writers ... Read the full review
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MY SHADOW BOOK, a novel by MAAWAAM, edited by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris
In the summer of 2011, novelist and scholar Jordan A. Rothacker discovered a box containing the journals of a being known as Maawaam. Thus begins My Shadow Book—part literary manifesto, part metafictional frame narrative. The novel itself is credited to Maawaam, while Rothacker gives himself the title of editor. This framing device, the found manuscript, is used throughout literature as a way of creating verisimilitude in the reading experience. By claiming to have found and compiled Maawaam’s papers, Rothacker gives the novel legitimacy as a real, authentic document, while also absolving himself of any blame for the contents: he simply discovered these writings, and so is not responsible for their creation ... Read the full review
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THE BEST WE COULD DO: AN ILLUSTRATED MEMOIR by Thi Bui reviewed by Jenny Blair
The Best We Could Do begins with birth. Thi Bui is a first-time mother in California, and her own mother--despite having flown across the country to be there--has quietly excused herself from the delivery room ... Read the full review
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ALL THAT MAN IS, a novel by David Szalay, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
In an interview with NPR, David Szalay pointed out that the title of his novel, All that Man Is, can be read two different ways: “either as a sort of slightly disparaging, sort of all that man is, and this is it. Or it can be read as a sort of almost celebratory—everything, all the kind of great variety of experience that life contains.” Szalay seems to see his work as falling somewhere in between, not entirely “disparaging” nor precisely “celebratory,” since it is a study of men dealing with situations of personal crisis. While many reviewers have described All that Man Is as bleak and depressing, Szalay confesses that he might have a “lower expectation of life than the average.” ... Read the full review
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THE MADELEINE PROJECT, a work of creative nonfiction by Clara Beaudoux, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
In 2013, a young journalist named Clara Beaudoux moves into a Paris apartment. The previous tenant, a woman named Madeleine, lived there for 20 years before passing away in her nineties. Strangely, Madeleine’s things have not been removed from the cellar. “All I had to do was open a door, the door to my cellar, for the adventure to begin,” writes Beaudoux ... Read the full review
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THE FUTURE WON’T BE LONG, a novel by Jarett Kobek, reviewed by Jordan A. Rothacker
The New York City of the decade in which The Future Won’t Be Long is set is a city in transition, sloughing off the dirty skin of a seriously fertile artistic period to eventually reveal a heartless skeleton scraped clean by Mayor Giuliani and the NYPD by the book’s end. From the start, the city is riveting for Baby, who describes how he “wandered New York, its manic energy seeping into my bones. The pavement vibrated, resonating with billions of earlier footsteps, centuries of people making their way, the city alive with the irregular heartbeat of its million cars and trucks, of its screaming pedestrians, its vendors and hustlers. The roar and clamor infected my blood, transforming my walk.” ... Read the full review
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ISLAND OF POINT NEMO, a novel by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube
Island of Point Nemo is a fast-moving adventure story featuring murderers, romance, and preternatural turns. But dig further into those turns, and the novel is ultimately a eulogy to books, both as physical objects and as containers for fiction. Written by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès and newly translated from French by Hannah Chute, Island of Point Nemo features suspenseful plotlines that intertwine in such a way as to make the reader question the natures of fiction, reality, and history ... Read the full review
INSURRECTIONS, stories by Rion Amilcar Scott, reviewed by William Morris
The stories in Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection, Insurrections, are set in Cross River, Maryland, a small East Coast city you won’t find on any map. The city itself is a work of fiction, but the lives of its inhabitants feel startlingly real. Among the Cross Riverians—or Riverbabies, depending on who you ask—included in this collection are a suicidal father, an old man known as the slapsmith, and a pair of brothers separated by the constantly flooding Cross River, which gives the city its name and divides it into the affluent Northside and impoverished Southside ... Read the full review
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MAP DRAWN BY A SPY, a novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, reviewed by reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf
Posthumous novels are both a joy and, sometimes, a let-down. Left behind by an author whose polished work stands as a testament to the full capacity of his or her mind, the words on the page surface at first like an extension from the past. This one last bit of evidence left for us to find. The posthumous novel should be examined and praised as a rare object—hidden in a vault, locked in an old suitcase, tucked into an envelope—and given a small bit of license for being not quite the full body of work its author intended ... Read the full review
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IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS, a graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, reviewed by Jenny Blair
If we felt attached to and invested in the ground beneath our feet, how would the world be different? What’s the difference between feeling rooted in a place and feeling stuck there? And how is one to face the facts of geographic and human impermanence? ... Read the full review
NOTES OF A CROCODILE, a novel by Qiu Miaojin, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
Lazi argues that mapping secrets and pain can be a matter of life and death, and Qiu’s suicide seems to attest to that. Considering the stresses of our present age, where identities and ideologies are masking and unmasking, the intrapersonal mapping of identity is even more significant for artists that would influence culture. That might be another way that Notes of a Crocodile is oddly predictive; or, its tendency to speak so clearly to our global present might mean that Lazi—and Qiu’s—struggle for self-identification is timeless. In either case, Notes of a Crocodile is an important addition to literature that addresses identity and sexuality, as well as a significant stylistic legacy from a writer prematurely lost ... Read the full review
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The Apostle Killer by Richard Beard Melville House, 331 pages  reviewed by Ansel Shipley Jesus is the enemy in The Apostle Killer: a socialist anti-establishment religious extremist. In the novel, Richard Beard creates a world that melds both the superstitious past, in which a self-described Messiah could amass a frighteningly large following, and the skeptical present that labels such men religious extremists and terrorists. “With Jesus, the trickery is without end. If he feigned his death he was extending a pattern that started with the miracles because what you see, with Jesus, is rarely what you get.” The protagonist, Cassius Gallio, is a counterinsurgency agent, a “Speculator” tasked with stamping out superstition and political threats to Rome’s control over Jerusalem. As a young man, Gallio found himself assigned to disprove Jesus’s miraculous resurrection and quickly became embroiled in a twisted web of uncertainty and dangerous machinations. A series of dead-ends and Judas’s suicide (which Gallio is convinced was a hit performed on Jesus’s orders) results in Gallio being sent to Moldova in career exile. After his old partner Valeria, now a major mover-and-shaker in Rome, reopens the case against Jesus, Gallio returns to Jerusalem to prove once and for all ... Read the full review
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GOING DARK, stories by Dennis Must, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
An aging and dying actor, a blank slate, a forgotten man. This is the first narrator the reader meets in Dennis Must’s 2016 collection of seventeen short stories, Going Dark. The narrator of the title story, though a nobody, shares much in common with the other narrators and characters of the stories that follow in the collection. Indeed, throughout the collection, Must’s characters wrestle with important questions about identity, sanity, and morality, as their lives are colored by the particular details of their lives: their cars, the music they listen to, and their work. . The reason the first narrator, the actor, considers himself a nobody is that his identity is simply that of every character he has ever played. His own identity is simply lost ... Read the full review
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FLOWER WARS, poems by Nico Amador, reviewed by Claire Oleson
In Nico Amador’s Flower Wars, the lines of poetry are full of flesh and voice, both of which are sure of their uncertainty and masterfully show the reader that, if we would trust an author to write their own poem, we should absolutely trust someone with reordering, preserving, mangling, and or perfecting the syllables of their own humanity. If you are a person and or a body, Flower Wars is relevant and vital reading ... Read the full review
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LATE FAME, a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
Herr Eduard Saxberger lives in a pleasant apartment overlooking the Vienna Woods. Each night after spending the day in his civil service office, he eats at his usual restaurant where he interacts little with his companions beyond small talk and basic requests, and goes for a walk. His life is stable, if a bit empty. But one day a young man named Wolfgang Meier appears at the door, clutching a copy of the Wanderings, poems by Eduard Saxberger, and the somewhat bumbling, bourgeois civil servant is thrown back into a past he hardly remembers ... Read the full review
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THE BURNING GIRL, a novel by Claire Messud, reviewed by Amanda Klute
Hindsight never fails in providing a comprehensive scope of recently-felt chaos—this is the key narrative tool Claire Messud employs in her intimate coming-of-age novel, The Burning Girl. The Burning Girl offers deep insight into a seemingly minuscule and ordinary loss of two young Massachusetts girls, and quietly probes us to ponder the necessity, ridicule, and unfairness that results from a society prizing itself on the lack of innocence as means of survival ... Read the full review
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PLAINSPEAK, WY, poems by Joanna Doxey, reviewed by Brandon Stanwyck
Plainspeak, WY is impressive in its attention to detail and draws clear connections from matters of the earth to matters of the soul—and back again, repeatedly. The poet’s central obsession is depicted, in fact, somewhat subtly, on the cover of the book as a topographical map. Atop a cool, arctic blue, several thin black contour lines unevenly work their way around one another and connect to make shaky targets that reveal the gradual shifts in Wyoming’s terrain, formed largely, of course, by the glaciers that have so ensnared Doxey’s imagination. Plainspeak, WY, ultimately, is about the inevitable erosion of the human heart, as mirrored by the slowly eroding landscape of the northwestern United States ... Read the full review
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THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES, a novel by Catherynne M. Valente, reviewed by Ansel Shipley
Catherynne M. Valente’s most recent novel, The Refrigerator Monologues, exists in an odd space between novel and what could be called a pseudo-parable. Valente’s six protagonists and her interconnected narratives clearly parallel famous female comic book characters and their narrative arcs. Each of them, in fact, exhibits numerous traits that link her to a specific DC or Marvel property, ensuring that nothing is lost on the reader ... Read the full review
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FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS, a novel by Rebecca Entel, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
“The narrator of this book is a Caribbean woman. You may have noticed that the writer of this book is not,” Rebecca Entel notes in a preface to Fingerprints of Previous Owners, her novel set at a resort built on the nettle-choked ruins of a former slave plantation. Alluding to her research and credentials as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, Entel does more than attempt to deflect criticism for cultural appropriation. She declares her investment in this story, as well as her intention to free her characters from a colonial narrative frame ... Read the full review
MIKHAIL AND MARGARITA, a novel by Julie Lekstrom Himes, reviewed by Ryan K. Strader 
Julie Lekstrom Himes’ novel, Mikhail and Margarita, imagines the love affair that might have inspired The Master and Margarita. This is Himes’ first novel, following the publication of several short stories and essays. Himes is a physician in Massachusetts; interestingly, Bulgakov was also a physician. In an interview with the literary website Eye 94, Himes describes reading Bulgakov’s collection A Country Doctor’s Notebook (reflections on his early years as a doctor) and identifying with “the fear and regret and self-questioning” of a young doctor. Identifying with Bulgakov’s “voice” as a doctor encouraged Himes to try writing from his perspective, to imagine what compelled him to write one of the canonical Russian texts of the 20th century ... Read the full review
BARDO OR NOT BARDO, a novel by Antoine Volodine, reviewed by Amada Klute
Take the existential universe of Jean-Paul Sartre and pull his pants down around his ankles—this is the paradoxical narrative met with in French comedic novelist Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo. Volodine’s blunt, absurdist style illustrates a marriage between the profound and the comedic, using humor as a weapon to further investigate humanity’s most unanswerable questions ... Read the full review
The cover of Exposure, a short story collection by Katy Resch George, hints at the kind of stories you’ll find inside. The photograph of a topless woman on a beach with her arms tugged behind her is both intimate and distant, the woman exposed but also obscured by the translucent type of the title and, in the repeated image, wrapped around the spine of the book, also underneath type. The woman’s expression is blocked by George’s name on the spine and, on the front cover, hard to make out. Is she scowling at the camera? Pondering something beyond it? Seductive, angry, unsure? George’s female characters, especially, are exposed and obscured in this intriguing book ... Read the full review
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THE GERMAN GIRL, a novel by Armando Lucas Correa, reviewed by Kellie Carle
The German Girl permits readers to enter the minds of two 12-year-old girls as their lives are shaped by the tragedies of the SS St. Louis and 9/11. Correa expertly combines fact with fiction, as he constructs and then deconstructs the lives of two young girls. He also illustrates the importance a family’s history and the need to pass down history through the generations. The story of the contemporary girl, Anna, is imbedded (as is her name) in Hannah’s and though this is the conceit of the novel, it is also a weakness ... Read the full review
TRYSTING, fiction by Emmanuelle Pagano, reviewed by Rachel R. Taube
Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting is an intimate romance among hundreds. This book of fictional fragments, each in the first person, features character after character—most of indeterminate gender, age, and history—falling in and out of love. The self-contained pieces range from one sentence meditations to several hundred word flash fictions. The shortest of these could be writing prompts, while others read as prose poems. Reading Trysting can, in fact, be like reading a book of poetry, and it benefits from slow, thoughtful study. You could linger over any one piece, reread it and taste the rhythm, the carefully chosen words ... Read the full review
NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND, a novel by Thomas Keneally, reviewed by Nokware Knight
Based on the synopsis (conquered conqueror stuck on island hesitantly befriends by young native girl) and artwork (an ocean crashing into the bottom of seaside cliffs) on the book jacket, I expected in part to read the account of an aged, brooding, and isolated man pacing away his final days on an isolated rock, sometimes tolerant of, sometimes avoidant, sometimes thankful for his friendship with a young girl who lives there. For better, and for worse, I found something else ... Read the full review
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LILLI DE JONG, a novel by Janet Benton, reviewed by Joanne Green
“When I write, I forget that I don’t belong to myself.” So observes Lilli de Jong, whose journal entries narrate Janet Benton’s impressive debut novel, set in the 1880s. Lilli is as spirited and determined as Jane Eyre, as sensible as Elinor Dashwood, and as downtrodden as Little Nell. Yet on the subjects of reproductive rights, affordable day care, and the cost of motherhood for women the book speaks directly to readers, today ... Read the full review
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HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, an anthology for young readers edited by Kelly Jensen, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
Feminism. It’s an ideology that has long been approached with trepidation, met with both skepticism and controversy. There have been countless articles, papers, films, and books exploring and defining the concept. However, Here We Are is more than a series of essays on feminism. It’s a collection of stories, blog posts, comics, drawings, and interviews featuring an array of different voices – each more unique than the last – describing what feminism means and how it plays a role in our lives. Each page encourages readers to think about how they, as individuals, can relate to a belief that strives to unite us as a whole ... Read the full review
Trust the Brits to find the humor in anything. Tom Sperlinger’s Romeo and Juliet in Palestine, a brief memoir of a semester the author spent as a visiting professor of English literature at Al Quds University in Abu Dis in the West Bank, deploys wry wit to combat the absurdities of living and teaching in a place of controlled chaos ... Read the full review
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FAMILY LEXICON, a novel by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Jenny McPhee, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
Now in a new translation by Jenny McPhee (and with a new English title), Family Lexicon is Natalia Ginzburg’s Strega Prize winning memoir/novel of life in Italy before, during, and after World War II, Lessico famigliare, first published in 1963. Ginzburg is known mainly in this country for being a “writer’s writer,” a phrase which is often used to compensate for an author’s lack of fame. But in Ginzburg’s case, perhaps there’s a bit more to it; her essays are often assigned on writing workshop syllabi alongside favorites like Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and George Orwell. A quick Internet search for “Natalia Ginzburg” and “syllabus” turns up countless options. In fact, it was in a creative writing class where I was first introduced to her work, the devastatingly simple essay “He and I.” ... Read the full review
DNA Hymn, poems by Annah Anti-Palindrome, reviewed by Johnny Payne
The disturbing cover art of DNA Hymn features a woman whose bloody mouth discharges what appear to be balloons, intestines, or giant molecules. The image seems apt for a collection of poems that freely disgorges both intelligence and emotional wisdom. This book by the semi-pseudonymous Annah Anti-Palindrome waxes conceptual to be sure, but not to the point where each individual poem is negated by an overarching Big Idea. In the introduction, the author explains that “resisting palindromes” derives from her mother’s morphine overdose and her desire as a daughter, both linguistic and existential, to break out of a legacy of violence. The first poem, “extraction,” fittingly takes an epidural as its footnote and birth as its subject: “tooth tile milk moon marrow . clock jaw limb socket hollow ./ split hair curl coil crescent . wet nest yolk part swallow .” ... Read the full review
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TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS by Tom McCarthy reviewed by William Morris
TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS by Tom McCarthy New York Review Books, 288 Pages reviewed by William Morris I am writing this on Monday May 8, 2017, the night before Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays, a collection of the work of British writer Tom McCarthy, will be published. I checked my watch to be sure of the date, and found that it’s a day off. It claims today is the 7th. This small discrepancy is hardly worth noting, except as it pertains to McCarthy’s obsessive treatment of time in these essays. Time is an illusive business, a difficult thing to pin down, as it’s always moving out from under us. For McCarthy, time is a series of refrains and repetitions, arrests and elisions, and he turns to it again and again in this collection. McCarthy originally published or presented these essays as lectures, introductions to books, or accompaniments to art installations during the last decade-and-a-half. Readers may know McCarthy better from his novels (Satin Island, Remainder, C), in which case they won’t be surprised by the literary and philosophical topics covered in these essays. In “Get Real, or What Jellyfish Have to Tell Us About Literature,” for example, McCarthy writes about J.G ... Read the full review
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ATLANTIC HOTEL, a novel by João Gilberto Noll, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
“Love. Call me Love, the Word Incarnate.” This is the closest that readers get to a name for the protagonist and narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s strange little book, Atlantic Hotel, recently translated into English by Adam Morris. The novel is set in Brazil in the 1980s, and over the course of the book, the unnamed narrator embarks on a beguiling and pointless quest through the country. At different points he will seem to be—or perhaps will be—an actor, a priest, an alcoholic, an invalid. Along the way, Noll will shade his experiences with touches of Don Quixote and Odysseus, hints of The Stranger and a taste of the pantomime and absurdity of Fellini’s early 1960s films (Noll’s unnamed narrator a believable stand-in for the existentially angsty characters usually played by Marcello Mastroianni) ... Read the full review
THE LONG DRY, a novel by Cynan Jones, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
Ultimately this is a beautiful little novel that leaves the reader reeling with the powerful emotions it manages to render in such a short space and with such sparse language. The simple storyline also gives leave for musings over possible symbolism. For example, what does the cow represent? Of course it could represent nothing in particular, simply a lost cow, one of the millions of small reasons we give ourselves to keep living purposefully each day ... Read the full review
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BETWEEN TWO SKIES, a young adult novel by Joanne O’Sullivan, reviewed by Brenda Rufener
From the start, O’Sullivan pulls readers in with well-crafted characters and a beautifully painted setting. She drops the reader deep into the South with Hurricane Katrina looming offshore. The opening pages saturate us with the warmth, hospitality, and food that are so true to this geographical location. But we aren’t allowed to get too comfortable. Not with the bad weather reports and the life-changing storm churning at sea ... Read the full review
LIKE DEATH, a novel by Guy de Maupassant, reviewed by Derek M. Brown
With Like Death, Richard Howard—poet, critic, essayist, and professor at Columbia University—offers a rendering of Maupassant’s Fort comme la mort that, I can only presume, retains all of the lyrical richness of the original, published in 1889. It also offers startling insight into the extent of Maupassant’s influence, which can be found in some of the 20th century’s most seminal works ... Read the full review
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WAYWARD HEROES, a novel by Halldór Laxness, reviewed by Tyson Duffy
Certain great writers fade from the American memory like condensation from a windowpane. The Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness—he was once all the rage here—is one. He was considered something of an upstart, a genius, a social novelist, a fellow traveler of Upton Sinclair and Bertolt Brecht, and he often journeyed between Europe and America. A Marxist-Stalinist who was very critical of America, he was once important enough to attract the personal ire of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who worked hard to impoverish Laxness by attempting to confiscate profits from his U.S. book sales, which were considerable ... Read the full review
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HOW WE SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER: AN ESSAY DAILY READER, edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold, reviewed by David Grandouiller
How We Speak to One Another, which came out this month, is a book of essays on essays, on the Essay—that sprawling mountain of a form, reaching its roots into every fallow field. The reader sinks in to find Ander Monson digging his way: “I’d thought of my own essaying as mine work, a kind of solo exploration down here in the dark. But then one time I was chipping at a hunk of rock, watching my tool spark, and suddenly it broke through a wall and ran into another tunnel.” The tunnel is John D’Agata’s. This kind of encounter, told in one of Monson’s quirky conceits, is representative of the rest of the anthology. These essays are excavations in what the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton called (in his last address, just two hours before his death) the “interdependence of all living [and dying] beings.” ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
LOVE, ISH, a middle grades novel by Karen Rivers, reviewed by Christine M. Hopkins
Twelve-year-old Mischa Love—or Ish—wants to be among the first colonists on Mars more than anything, and has applied to a program in Iceland offering this chance (and been rejected) nearly 50 times. She knows pretty much everything there is to know about Mars. When it comes to science, her convictions are strong. “Global warming is a real thing,” she tells us with unwavering certainty. “You can pretend it’s not, but that’s just dumb. It’s science.” ... Read the full review
DOWN BELOW, a memoir by Leonora Carrington, reviewed by Justin Goodman
A hundred years after Leonora Carrington’s birth, her painting and writing seems, to the modern viewer, as defamiliarized and spontaneous as it did when it first appeared under the Surrealist banner ... Read the full review
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MOONCOP, a graphic novel by Tom Gauld, reviewed by Ansel Shipley
Melancholy can be a difficult tone for authors to elicit. Paired with too much unwarranted levity, or depicted as flat sadness without the requisite quiet contemplation, it can easily shift to the maudlin. Tom Gauld’s graphic novel, Mooncop, manages to delicately balance the emptiness of outer space with the intimacy of solitude, a tone which stayed with me days after putting the book down. Gauld packs an impressive amount of feeling into a tiny package—Mooncop is less than a hundred pages long and takes a maximum of thirty minutes to finish. I never felt overwhelmed by any single emotion, however, as a thin layer of meditative calm acts as a barrier between the potentially crushing despair of loneliness ... Read the full review
LABYRINTH LOST, a young adult novel by Zoraida Córdova, reviewed by Leticia Urieta
Alejandra Mortiz is a bruja. She lives her life in the presence of death. She comes from a long line of brujas, each with their own unique manifestation of power. But Alex, as her family and friends know her, does not revere the magical legacy of her family; she fears it. After seeing her Aunt Rosaria rise from the dead as a child, Alex is burdened by the sense that magic is not a gift, as her sisters Rose and Lula believe, but a curse. Her fear grows more acute as her Death Day approaches. This is a bruja’s coming of age celebration when the manifestation of her power is blessed by her ancestors ... Read the full review
SOVIET DAUGHTER: A GRAPHIC REVOLUTION by Julia Alekseyeva reviewed by Jenny Blair
Julia Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution could hardly have come at a better time. A Soviet-born woman who emigrated with her multigenerational Jewish family to the U.S. in 1992, the author entwines her great-grandmother Lola’s life story with her own, translating Lola’s own written memoir into part of a double narrative. As we all struggle to make sense of the Trump era, Alekseyeva has written and drawn a story of autocracy, revolution, and the refugee experience--and of how history affects the private lives not just of its eyewitnesses, but of many subsequent generations ... Read the full review
SHOT-BLUE, a novel by Jesse Ruddock, reviewed by Robert Sorrell
Shot Blue is written in a style that somehow combines an easy-spoken blue collar minimalism with wordplay and lyricism. The oblique, hidden emotions of the characters are balanced in part by the ingenuity and playfulness of Ruddock’s language ... Read the full review
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HEMMING FLAMES, poems by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Claire Oleson
On the peripheries of almost constant domestic emergency and conflict, Patricia Colleen Murphy’s poetry collection Hemming Flames lights up disaster and familial antipathy with humor and endurance. Many of the pieces in this collection share threads of the same story, featuring reoccurring family figures and familiar, though often growing, conflicts. There is an undeniable amount of devastation and trauma inside these family stories, but Murphy’s true skill lies not in showing what’s often the obvious and expected pain of it all, but in bringing a humor and an odd sense of the mundane to seemingly shocking moments ... Read the full review
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IF YOU WERE HERE, a  young adult novel by Jennie Yabroff, reviewed by Caitlyn Averett
In Jennie Yabroff’s debut young adult novel, If You Were Here, Yabroff shows the normal struggles of growing up combined with the confusion of dealing with a parent suffering from mental illness. If You Were Here follows Tess Block, a girl who relishes summer vacations where she can hide away in her grandmother’s country cabin and not have to deal with high school or family. It means no contact with her best friend, Tabitha, because there’s no cell service, but Tess enjoys the freedom of escaping NYC for a few months, and the freedom from what’s going on at home with her mother ... Read the full review
The Trump administration, however, is a near perfect embodiment of the Money Cult. One need simply look at the two men on top: Trump, one of the embodiments of American capitalism, and Pence, a fervent evangelical. There is also open access in the administration for other ardent Christians, such as for the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, a surgeon who preaches self-activation. Lehmann argues that the United States began, essentially, during the seventeenth century colonial era of John Winthrop, as a kind of theocracy, a union between religion and politics; and now it has ended with a different union, one between religion and business. In the era of Trump, this union decisively includes politics once more ... Read the full review
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The unnamed narrator of The Year of the Comet is born the moment an earthquake strikes Moscow. “The earthquake was my first impression of being: the world was revealed to me as instability, shakiness, the wobbliness of foundations.” Therefore, he observes, “My feelings, my ability to feel, were fashioned by that underground blow. I had trouble understanding anything to do with stability, immutability, and firmness, even though I wanted those states I could not achieve; disharmony was closer and more understandable than harmony.” ... Read the full review
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MOTHER-MAILBOX, poems by Emilie Lindemann, reviewed by Rachel Summerfield
mother-mailbox is a private life, the private mode of womanhood, made public for all of us who have ever felt empty, questioned if there was more (or made new subs out of Subway sandwich wrappings to feel such a thing) and questioned how we should be feeling, but also those of us who have found beauty and humor in the “fade-proof plum lip-root mess” of it all, for those of us who seek a home within ourselves and those we make of ourselves; for those of us whose mothers or children have made spiraling, fairytale messes in our lives, flitting in and out as fragile as a flower until they suddenly take solid root ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
SWIMMING LESSONS, a novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
“A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader,” says writer Gil Coleman, the rogue central character of Claire Fuller’s Swimming Lessons. When he tells a bookshop assistant that “first editions don’t matter,” he seems to argue that access is more important than ownership, that a book’s content is more valuable than the object enclosing the text. But the impulse behind the sentiment is hardly democratic; his words cast light on his unequal marriage to Ingrid, a student he impregnates, derailing her education. Infamous for a single work (the lurid and presumably autobiographical A Man of Pleasure), Gil is oddly less interested in an author’s words than in “the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked up the pages,” and “the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks.” By the end of his life, his wife is gone and his library is full of “bits of paper with which he could piece together other people’s lives, other people who had read the same books he held and who had marked their place.” It’s also full of clues to solve a mystery at the center of this skillfully structured and satisfying novel: Where did Ingrid go, and why? ... Read the full review
ROLLING BLACKOUTS: DISPATCHES FROM TURKEY, SYRIA, AND IRAQ, a work of graphic journalism by Sarah Glidden, reviewed by Brian Burmeister
Throughout its 300-plus pages, Rolling Blackouts provides valuable historical contexts and multiple viewpoints to help any reader better understand the region and its people. Glidden incorporates the voices of government officials, aid workers, refugees – even a former terror suspect, among many others, in order to showcase the complicated realities of life in those countries. We meet those whose lives were improved from the Iraq War as well as those whose lives were destroyed. We meet those who love the United States, and those who say, “I don’t want to bring children into a country that could be bombed by America.” As Glidden writes: “I think sometimes journalists get caught up in the hard news part, in investigating an unknown angle. But they forget that for most of our audiences, it’s all an unknown angle.” Incorporating a large chorus of voices, Glidden hopes to inform and challenge her readers ... Read the full review
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WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR, stories by Patrick Dacey, reviewed by Tyson Duffy
In Patrick Dacey’s first story collection, We’ve Already Gone This Far, available now in hardback and due out from Picador in paperback June 27, we find out what happens when we yield to life’s despiritualized strangeness in the twenty-first century’s overweening atmosphere of hogwild commercialism and ideological rigidity. (His first novel, The Outer Cape (Henry Holt & Co), will debut in hardback on the same date.) Dacey seems to be an interesting character himself in this regard, a bespoke and downtrodden seeker of his own soul adrift in corporatized America. The descriptions he’s given in interviews of a difficult youth and family life, the bouts of poverty he endured as an adult, are evidence of a nature informed largely by pain and wonder. His father was a gambler who went broke repeatedly and thereafter took his son on long door-to-door sales trips. Later, Dacey raised his own son while living hand-to-mouth on hourly wages, after studying under George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill at the Syracuse MFA program. The agony of the peripatetic writer undergoing economic uncertainties comes through strongly in his work; Dacey’s writing often reflects the rawness of material poverty, a certain yearning for inner enrichment or a scatterbrained ... Read the full review
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MY ITALIANS: True Stories of Crime and Courage, essays by Roberto Saviano, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner
The essay collection My Italians: True Stories of Crime and Courage, the provocateur Robert Saviano’s newest nonfiction work, is a startling condemnation of contemporary Italian life. For about a decade, Saviano’s one-man campaign against organized crime in Naples has made him famous across Italy. But he’s little known in the U.S., or he was at least until recently when a TV adaptation of his 2007 bestseller, Gomorrah, about the crime syndicate, la Camorra, began airing on the Sundance Channel (Italian director Matteo Garrone also made a 2008 film by the same name). Yet Saviano’s expertise on the malavita and how it’s infiltrated legitimate business knows no borders. Last year, he gave a talk at a conference in England about how business transactions in London’s much-vaunted City financial district are in fact influenced and manipulated by organized crime ... Read the full review
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IN LIEU OF FLOWERS by Rachel Slotnick Tortoise Books, 48 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Rachel Slotnick’s debut collection, In Lieu of Flowers—an eclectic combination of lyric poems, flash prose, and mixed-media paintings by the author, who is also an accomplished painter and muralist—is part in memoriam and part Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The paintings are of particular interest because they play an essential role in how we understand the poems rather than being simply decorative or extraneous as can sometimes happen when paintings and poems are paired up together in such a context. Most are essentially portraits, though not purely mimetic ones. Her paintings have a surreal quality, the edges often blurred as one image becomes another: a beard becomes a fish, a shirt melts into the coral of the sea floor, and flowers, always flowers sprouting where they desire. “I tried to paint my grandfather,” says the speaker, “and the figure devolved into flowers.” Often the paintings also include multiple perspectives of the same central figure, reminding me conceptually more of cubism than surrealism, Picasso’s figures (of Françoise Gilot, for example) often turning into flowers as well. Althought Slotnick’s paintings and poems were conceived separately, it is clear that what motivated the ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
A GREATER MUSIC, a novel by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith and reviewed by Justin Goodman
Bae Suah’s newest English-translated work, A Greater Music, describes the Austrian composer Franz Schubert as “a short, fat, shy myopic.” As brutal as this description is of a man who unhappily died before his 32nd year, it seems altogether different in tone when used to describe Bae’s novel itself. Filled with observatory indifference and an almost disembodied airiness, the novel comes across particularly as commentary, and as particularly rebellious. But what’s striking about A Greater Music is that it treats the work of Schubert above the man, treats the novel above the social, giving grandeur to otherwise short, fat, shy myopics. They are breathing things that were trapped in frames ill-suited for their sublimity--short in length, fat with substance, shy about their revelations, and myopic in their attentions, they are beings greater than their comportment can present. Something so heavy has rarely looked so light ... Read the full review
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HUMAN ACTS, a novel by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith, reviewed by William Morris
First published in South Korea in 2014, Han Kang’s new novel Human Acts is now available for the first time in the United States. American readers first encountered Kang in 2016, with the translation of her 2007 novel The Vegetarian. This strange, dark, poetic novel, about a woman who decides to stop eating meat after having a horrific nightmare, was met with great acclaim. Translated by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian went on to win the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. While Human Acts is a rich, powerful novel in its own right, and should be read independently of The Vegetarian, it is often interesting to situate a novel against the writer’s other work ... Read the full review
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OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION by Damian Duffy and John Jennings reviewed by Brian Burmeister
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S KINDRED: A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION by Damian Duffy and John Jennings Abrams Comicarts, 240 pages reviewed by Brian Burmeister Crowned the “grand dame of science fiction” by Essence, Octavia Butler was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed science fiction writers of the 20th century. Her career spanned over a dozen novels and, among her many awards and honors,  Butler was the first science fiction writer to win a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, before being cut short. In 2006, she  tragically passed away at the age of fifty-eight. Thirty-eight years after its original publication, Butler’s best-selling novel, Kindred, and by extension Butler’s own voice and vision, has been given new life. Considered by many to be her most accessible work, the novel has been adapted into a graphic novel by cartoonist/writer Damian Duffy and editor/artist John Jennings. Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, like the history it shares, is haunting. At its core, it is a story of pain, a tale of survival. A twenty-something writer from the year 1976, living in California, is mysteriously and repeatedly pulled through time and space to early 1800s Maryland. This protagonist, Dana Franklin, an African American, is thrust ... Read the full review
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THE LOVERS' PHRASEBOOK, poems by Jordi Alonso, reviewed by Claire Oleson
Jordi Alonso’s collection The Lovers' Phrasebook shelves itself precisely in the lexical gap between languages, working with absence to depict presence and utilizing singular words to display relationships. These poems are able to gesture at miscommunication and a lack of sufficient vocabulary while also creating space for new conversation. The Lovers' Phrasebook excels in its bravery and conceptual construction, working to translate without obscuring or whiting-out the original word in favor of an English counterpart. It’s a book that hails the multiplicity of loves and languages, largely favoring an experiential approach to definition rather than a literal one. The Lovers' Phrasebook is an invitation to re-imagine how we move between languages and what the space in between words and their translations means and can be used for. By placing love in the space between fluency and confusion, Alonso has turned what could have been a dictionary into a romance ... Read the full review
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WHIPSTITCHES, poems by Randi Ward reviewed by Hannah Wendlandt
Whipstitches is, at its core, an examination of all the many aspects of a rural home, especially a rural childhood home. The pastoral is tinged with loss and decay because the world is, it is colored by the lives drawing strength from it just as is the earth, and so this small somewhere becomes a whole and complete universe. Randi Ward’s poems are neat and well-edited impressionistic snapshots that interact in a novel way to create depth despite their length. Ward is triumphant in her presentation of a rural childhood; you know this girl. You’ve seen her at a diner or a gas station. Come hear what she has to say ... Read the full review
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Only More So, poems by Millicent Borges Accardi, reviewed by paulA neves
Only More So is a read for troubled times. War, climate change, cancer—it’s all here in forty-six poems of mid-life contemplation that simultaneously remind us that forgetting the past condemns us to repeat it and that celebrating the remembering is a necessary act of resistance and transcendence. Appropriately, the former sentiment originates not from Churchill, the statesman who appropriated it in wartime, but George Santayana, the poet who believed “only the dead have seen the end of war.” ... Read the full review
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BLINDSIGHT, poems by Greg Hewett, reviewed by Brent Matheny
Throughout Blindsight, the reader is presented with the voice of a poet whose urges to feel and desires to know reflect those universal to humanity. Through his plainspoken language which is, at times, conversational and, at times, confessional we are reminded of our own desires, those things for which we do still burn. We are also reminded of our own blindness, literal and otherwise which obstruct our view, reflecting the world through a glass darkly. But even in the dim light, in the uncertainty, even when, after finally getting what you want, you’re not sure if you’re left “maybe more/ nervous than longing, / maybe indifferent, or regretting”, there is still beauty in this muddled world, even when we are left lying, “mourning among the ruins.” ... Read the full review
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BEFORE PICTURES, a memoir by Douglas Crimp, reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
Douglas Crimp’s memoir Before Pictures invites readers into the lively artistic and queer worlds of 1960s to 1970s New York where Crimp was formed as an art historian. This is the same New York which brought him to curate Pictures, a small exhibit at Artist’s Space now considered pivotal to ideas about contemporary art. In the art history textbook Art Since 1900 (2004), Pictures is historicized as having given a platform to artwork meant to give “a new sense of the image as ‘picture’” and to “transcend any particular medium.” Here, Crimp embraces this transcendence in a different way. In his consideration, no single art form, from fashion to architecture, comes out as primary ... Read the full review
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YEAR OF THE RAT, a novel by Marc Anthony Richardson, reviewed by Matthew Jakubowski
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist from Philadelphia and this compact book, his first, which won the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovation Fiction, makes for a fine addition to the recent history of experimental prose by writers with ties to Philadelphia—from the late Fran Ross (whose 1974 novel, Oreo, was recently re-issued) to contemporaries like Samuel R. Delany, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Hilary Plum, Caren Beilin, and the West Philadelphia sci-fi collective Metropolarity ... Read the full review
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THESE ARE THE NAMES, a novel by Tommy Wieringa reviewed by Robert Sorrell
The hero–or perhaps I should say anti-hero–of Dutch author Tommy Wieringa’s new novel, These Are the Names is a 53-year-old police chief named Pontus Beg. Beg lives in a fictional border town called Michailopol, a city ailing in post-Soviet corruption and aimless malaise. Beg has “set up his life as a barrier against pain and discomfort,” Wieringa writes. “Suppressing chaos: washing dishes, maintaining order. What did it matter that one day looked so much like the other that he could not recall a single one; he keeps to the middle equidistant from both bottom and top.” ... Read the full review
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YOU ASK ME TO TALK ABOUT THE INTERIOR, poems by Carolina Ebeid, reviewed by Claire Oleson
Poetry is often in danger of being understood as purely conceptual material in need of processing and interpretation in order to become meaningful or real. It can be easy, after wading through stanzas, to lose a grip on time and place and the sensation of occupying a body. However, despite the ethereality and distance from reality poetry often possesses, Caroline Ebeid has proven that it can also be used to ground and remind us of the physical rather than simply blur or distract from it. In her collection You Ask Me to Talk About The Interior, Ebeid employs a sort of “bodily language,” flexing smoothly between word and body until the two seem irredeemably tied. I would argue that Ebeid, and this collection in particular, works to close the distance between words and what they mean, bringing the signified and signifier together on the physical stage of the paper ... Read the full review
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AND WIND WILL WASH AWAY, a novel by Jordan A. Rothacker, reviewed by William Morris
Detective Jonathan Wind is not a wisecracking, hardboiled investigator in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, or a hyper-observant sleuth like Sherlock Holmes. Rather, Wind uses his almost encyclopedic knowledge to investigate crimes for the Atlanta Police Department. When he’s not on a case, the protagonist of Jordan A. Rothacker’s And Wind Will Wash Away splits his time between Monica, his devout Catholic girlfriend, and his secret mistress, Flora, a goddess-worshipping sex worker ... Read the full review
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THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET, stories by Jacob M. Appel, reviewed by Odette Moolten
The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street, winner of the 2016 Howling Bird Press fiction prize, is an honest, funny, and sometimes un-apologetically dark collection of short stories.. Its author, Jacob M. Appel (Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets (2015), The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up (2012)) can easily be described as a modern renaissance man: in addition to his writing, he is also a bioethicist, attorney, and a physician. These professional fields come into play in many of the stories included in this collection, often to highlight or expose ethical conflicts his characters must face ... Read the full review
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THE YOUNG BRIDE, a novel by Alessandro Baricco, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
The author of the novel, Alessandro Baricco, a popular Italian writer, director and performer, suggests that a world based around logic and sense ultimately will stifle us. It is in fact, what the narrator of the main story, the “author” (easy to conflate with Baricco, though we shouldn’t), desires to escape from. He does so by running to fantasy: a place gleefully empty of logic or sense. However this is not to suggest that it is a place of chaos or anarchy—in fact quite the opposite. Fantasy rather offers refuge from the chaos of everyday life through its own simple and overriding logic: repetition ... Read the full review
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COBALT BLUE, a novel by Sachin Kundalkar, reviewed by Nokware Knight
Tanay is a young, closeted queer man trying to work through an internal rut by living for the company of and validation from others. As Tanay befriends an out-of-towner renting a room in his family’s home, he finds himself in awe of the Guest’s ability to thrive in solitude, to fully embrace his mood of the moment, to being in a class of “men who lived their own idiosyncrasies” (the house guest is unnamed in the novel, but for the sake of clarity in this review I call him the Guest). It’s enough to gradually wrestle Tanay out of his day-to-day haze, to make him “aware of the mediocrity, the ordinariness” of his “secure and comfortable life.” Anuj, Tanay’s fiercely independent younger sister, is also taken by the Guest’s charms, but to different effect. For Anuj, the Guest doesn’t so much unearth a hidden urge to be, he reflects and accepts with ease the off-center personhood that comes natural to her, a personality she’s often had to defend to claim as her own ... Read the full review
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GOLDEN DELICIOUS, a novel by Christopher Boucher, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
Golden Delicious follows a fairly straight plot structure. (Thank God.) The novel’s a story of a family in Appleseed, Massachusetts, the kind of small town where apple-cheeked children frisk beside white picket fences, waving baseballs over the heads of leaping, barking terriers. It is, for lack of a better word, a wholesome place, a village that knows its own story too well to outgrow its roots. Here, history is literal. Sentences sprout from the soil, locals bear unusual names, and mothers practice their flight techniques. But under it, this is a simple story. The narrator, after his family takes to the four winds, sets out to save his town from hard times as its apple industry falters ... Read the full review
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The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh reviewed by Robert Sorrell
If writers are interested in portraying human experience in its varied forms, then part of that work is depicting climate change. Certainly there has been a strong tradition of writers turning to their surroundings for inspiration and literary fodder. And for many of these writers—Wendell Wendell Berry, Homero Aridjis, and Jean Giono for example—the earth becomes a character just as palpable and mercurial as any human, with capacity for danger alongside beauty. Yet our current moment calls for something even more complex: not just the earth, plants, and animals as powerful forces in fiction, but also a realization that we humans have brought this change upon our whole planet. And Ghosh, while not optimistic about the current state of literature, does think such fiction has yet been written in our age. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Liz Jensen’s Rapture are particularly good examples. Yet, these kinds of works, at least in Ghosh’s calculations, are the exception and not the rule ... Read the full review
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Come As You Are, a novel by Christine Weiser, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
Is there anything more disappointing than waking up in your mid-30s and wondering what the hell happened? Suddenly, you have a family, children, a mortgage, and a job that, despite your best efforts, is starting to define you. Your sensible car is in perfect order. You have a retirement account. Where’s the punk you used to be? What happened to all those bad decisions you made in your 20s? ... Read the full review
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RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT, a young adult novel by Sonia Patel, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
In her debut young adult novel Rani Patel in Full Effect, Sonia Patel takes us back to the era of faded box cuts, high-top Adidas, and gold chains as thick as your wrist; to the era where hip-hop reigned supreme and rhymes flowed out of boom boxes like water down Moaula Falls ... Read the full review
EASIEST IF I HAD A GUN, short stories by Michael Gerhard Martin, reviewed by Rosie Huf
It wasn’t Michael Gerhard Martin’s stories in the collection Easiest If I Had a Gun that wooed me as much as it was his crisp, visceral writing. His narrative constructs are alluring and beg to be unpacked, analyzed, and savored. Without apparent ego or bias, he transcribes the thoughts, memories, and dialogue of his characters as they struggle to navigate the mundane obstacles associated with living as lower middle-class, white Americans. This theme—the white man’s struggle—is not new. Yet, Martin manages to bring to the subject a fresh voice and a macabre sense of social conscience ... Read the full review
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IT LOOKS LIKE THIS, a young adult novel by  Rafi Mittlefehldt, reviewed by Allison Renner
When Mike and his family move, just before his freshman year, Mike starts high school in a new state and begins to forge some tentative friendships. But Victor, also low on the totem pole in terms of the high school hierarchy, seems to have a personal beef with him. Mike tries to lay low and mind his own business but Victor’s attention is unsettling ... Read the full review
BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH, a novel by Yoram Kaniuk, reviewed by David Grandouiller
Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli novelist who died in 2013, was the kind of man who tells jokes as he's dying in the hospital, even when he has no voice, when there's a respirator thrust through an incision in his chest. His humor is at times bitter, biting like Sholem Aleichem's pogrom narratives, descending into sullen anti-prayers: “cancer, like Hitler...is a messenger of the Lord.” In this respect, Kaniuk's Between Life and Death, published this year in English, probably most closely resembles Christopher Hitchens' Mortality. A sense of the meaninglessness in so much of life, of banality in death, pervades both authors’ stories. Kaniuk rages and rejoices, but sometimes qualifies these outbursts by settling, like Hitchens, for a tone of ambivalent irony, communicated in prose thick with vibrant images and cumulative sentences ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
THE LIGHT FANTASTIC, a young adult novel by Sarah Combs, reviewed by Allison Renner
To make a book about school shootings stand out among an influx of young adult books about the topic takes skill and in her new novel The Light Fantastic Combs delivers with detailed characters and a unique premise. Told from several different points of view, the novel covers the span of a few hours across multiple time zones as a new day starts and a nationwide school shooting epidemic begins ... Read the full review
THE BIRDS, a novel by Tarjei Vesaas, reviewed by Melanie Erspamer
Had The Birds been written from the perspective of another character other than Mattis, a dim-witted near forty-year old, it probably would have had a different title—The Lumberjack, maybe, or some other word that references one of the major events in the novel. But that’s the point: the perspective, usually in third person but sometimes slipping into first person, is Mattis’ and thus the story is his. Although often the characters in a book share the same events, they do not share the same story; for that, as Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas shows brilliantly in this moving novel, depends on the way we see things, on the importance we give to those events we share. For Mattis, the most important events in the novel concern the birds ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews, translation /
33 REVOLUTIONS, a novel by Canek Sánchez Guevara, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
Canek Sánchez Guevara’s 33 Revolutions is a prayer of a novel with a single liturgical refrain and a retort (of a kind) to the giddiness emitting from the American-Cuban travelsphere. Not since Reinaldo Arenas has a Cuban literary voice arrived on American shores with such beaten madness, and sense of personal desperation. Sánchez Guevara, who died last year at age 40, was the eldest grandson of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His mother, Hilda Guevara Gaesa, was Che’s oldest child; Hilda’s mother (also Hilda) introduced Che to the Castro brothers in the mid-1950s. (It’s worth remembering that the American literary public became enamored of Arenas after his death, too.) ... Read the full review
THE SEVEN MADMEN, a novel by Roberto Arlt reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf
Madness is synonymous with insanity, but to be “mad” one doesn’t necessarily go crazy. One might be mad at society, a world of socially imposed rules that stifle the imagination or measure people according to economic usefulness. Rage against a world in which a multicultural, mostly impoverished majority are controlled by a corrupt, wealthy minority could be defined as a type of “madness.” In such a state, the individual’s warped mind drives him to fantastical plans for revenge, deep wells of anguish or panic, brothel-filled nights, petty crimes, thoughts of suicide, kidnapping, and imagined love affairs ... Read the full review
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REALLY THE BLUES, a memoir by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, reviewed by Beth Johnston
You’re in another anonymous suburb at an undistinguished hotel on a Tuesday evening, traveling for work. After a day of meetings, you’re finally free to visit the hotel bar for a burger and a beer before you do it all over again tomorrow. At the counter, you take a seat two stools away from a middle-aged man in fine trousers, a white shirt, and a wide, loud tie, drinking something brown on the rocks. The man’s exchanges are first cordial, but then stretch into tall tales that make you fidget in your seat, and finally become oddly compelling, even touching. Just as the bartender calls for your last order, the story winds to a shimmering conclusion, leaving you with an unexpected sense of hope, of the power of persistence, of the redemption of art. That’s the feel of reading Mezz Mezzrow’s classic 1946 memoir, recently republished by NYRB Classics, about his life as a jazz saxophonist ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
As I plan to write a review of Donald Quist’s fine debut essay collection, Harbors, I follow the stories of two more black men shot and killed by police officers and know that, statistically as a white male, I will most likely never be positioned to fear the same fate. I write while growing increasingly concerned about my nation’s frenzied and ugly presidential race and about the increased acceptance of hateful speech in everyday conversation ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
MARCH, a graphic narrative by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell reviewed, by Brian Burmeister
Spanning three volumes, which are available separately or as a single collection, March covers key years of civil rights leader Lewis’s life and the battles for justice he experienced firsthand. The writers skillfully frame the overarching narrative of all three books as Rep. Lewis reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement during President Barack Obama’s historic inauguration in 2009 ... Read the full review
graphic narrative reviews, reviews /
In this collection, Karen Craigo continues to question the sanctity of the body in an imperfect world. Studying relationships, motherhood, the body, and the garden, No More Milk blends the sublime with the everyday in a raw and honest sense of awe, baring truths in considered lines and controlled imagery ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK, a novel by Ge Fei, reviewed by William Morris
The narrator and protagonist of The Invisibility Cloak—the first English translation of a novel by acclaimed Chinese writer Ge Fei—is not an inherently likeable person. Cui sees intellectuals as mainly full of nonsense. He is also quick to play the victim, blaming those around him for his misfortunes. But it would be difficult to read this novel without at times empathizing with the narrator. His wife left him, he’s living in his sister’s crummy apartment, and the only real solace he finds is in sitting in the dark, listening to Beethoven on CD ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Williams has pared away all but the essentials. These very short prose pieces are novels written in miniature, pocket epics and cryptic parables etched on the head of a pin. Most are not more than two pages, some are a single paragraph, and a few are just one or two sentences: simple, even stark, yet weighted. The sixty-first story, “Museum,” for example, is one rueful sentence: “We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.” ... Read the full review
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SIGNS OF YOU, a young adult novel by Emily France, reviewed by Rebecca Lee
Books labeled as science fiction and young adult can conjure many stereotypical images; a first kiss awkwardly felt on a playground swing set or a gothic vampire trying to survive an unknown universe. Emily France’s Signs of You defies these stereotypes as it takes on the story of a loss, friendship, and healing ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
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? ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
fiction reviews, reviews /
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 ... Read the full review
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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 ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
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 ... Read the full review
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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? ... Read the full review
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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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
nonfiction reviews, reviews /
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 ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
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? ... Read the full review
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 ... Read the full review
SAINT PAUL LIVES HERE (IN MINNESOTA), poems by Zach Czaia, reviewed by Hannah Kroonblawd
Zach Czaia’s debut poetry collection Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) is a poet’s response to revelations of sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. When the profane is unearthed beneath the divine, long-laid foundations begin to crumble. Perhaps no more clearly has this been observed than within the Catholic Church, where investigations of sexual abuse have spanned decades ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
A FAIRLY GOOD TIME, a novel by Mavis Gallant, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
A Canadian in Paris who must always remind her French friends that she is not American. A young widow who remarries a Frenchman, whom she later divorces. A twenty-seven-year-old who is “about like [she] always [was], to tell . . . the truth. Reading instead of listening.” This is Shirley Perrigny, formerly Higgins (nee Norrington), and the protagonist of Mavis Gallant’s 1970 novel A Fairly Good Time. Gallant, just like Shirley, was a Canadian who made Paris her home. Perhaps known best for her acclaimed short stories, Gallant wrote two novels, A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky. These two novels were re-published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, just two years since Gallant’s death at age 91 ... Read the full review
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OSTEND: STEFAN ZWEIG, JOSEPH ROTH, AND THE SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK, nonfiction by Volker Weidermann, reviewed by Michelle Fost
Volker Weidermann’s Ostend gives us the stories of writers Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, along with an ensemble of friends, coming for summer holiday to a favorite Belgian beach resort. The style is clipped and brief. History, dark fairy tale, friendship, fleeting joy, literary enchantment, dissipation, destruction, exile. Ostend reads as a time capsule that Weidermann has sorted through for us, and organized. It’s 1936, and the holiday begins like a David Hockney print, with an inviting surface of sea and sun and wide blue sky. But as we make our way through Weidermann’s collections of scenes from the period, the view looks more like something painted by James Ensor, the mask making, shell collecting, piano playing older artist who happens to live in a little house in Ostend. As we look behind the scenes at the act of literary creation we see the writer as an element of a complex artistic ecosystem. Ostend pushes us to think about the serious, long work necessary to heal an artistic ecosystem when racism has had a place inside it ... Read the full review
BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, a young adult novel by Laura Moe, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
Breakfast with Neruda is a true journey of the self, taking us deeper with every turn of the page. It shows us that healing can only take place once we dismantle the walls we painstakingly build around ourselves and that our most vulnerable selves might hide our strongest truths ... Read the full review
EDIBLE FLOWERS, poems by Lucia Chericiu, reviewed by Claire Oleson
It’s easy to forget, in the middle of reading a stanza or a paragraph or a recipe for sauerkraut, that language is something constantly occupied with its author’s intention and its reader’s reception — it is not still nor discreet nor impersonal, no matter how inhumane the result may taste. Lucia Chericiu’s poetry collection Edible Flowers, through its personal and intimate depictions of history, home, fruit, bodies, and language, communicates how language is constantly in translation, moving between nerve-endings and letters, and irrevocably infused with the humanity that authored it and the humanity that receives it ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
AMONG STRANGE VICTIMS, a novel by Daniel Saldaña París, reviewed by Lillian Brown
Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims, translated by Christina MacSweeney, immediately pulls the reader into its universe. It does so with such thorough and seamless skill that the reader becomes a victim of this strange, off-kilter world. While it’s initially easy to get lost trying to find the meaning, or premise in general, of the series of peculiar events that passes throughout the novel, the ride is worth the suspension of belief. What starts with a proposal in the form of a note, at first presumably left by a snarky, administrative coworker, becomes the catalyst in the marriage of Rodrigo and Cecilia, and the kickstarter for the novel’s bizarre happenings, wherein a group of lonely and bored people seek answers for the inexplicable in the everyday ... Read the full review
TONGUE SCREW, poems Heather Derr-Smith, reviewed by Johnny Payne
There is Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. There is Ted Hughes’ Animal Poems. And then there is Tongue Screw. May we justly call it confessional? Not without complications. What gave Plath and Hughes, that broken set of matching china, their staying power is not the impulse to tell all, but the containment of raw human experience within a careful structure of implacable imagery. Whether they influenced her, or whether she found her independent way through a haunted yet familiar landscape, Heather Derr-Smith uses the wound of image in each of her indelible poems ... Read the full review
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THE DEATHMASK OF EL GAUCHO, a novella by by Dan Mancilla, reviewed by Michael Chin
The Deathmask of El Gaucho functions cohesively for not only El Gaucho’s recurring appearances across the eight stories that shape the novella, but for the overriding themes introduced in this key story. Identity and the temporary nature of all things are at the heart of Mancilla’s work, and his fast-moving prose, suffused with wrestling lingo, such as suplexes and figure-four leg locks, bring the concepts to life in compulsively literary and subversive ways. El Gaucho is consumed with and by the identity he projects to the world. Mancilla uses Levesque and The Mask as a push-pull in the search for the wrestler’s true identity ... Read the full review
THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU, a young adult novel by Beth Kephart, reviewed by Rachael Tague
When I sat down to read Beth Kephart’s newest novel, This Is the Story of You, its title and cover art caught my attention—personal, serene, then chaotic. I read the first line of chapter one—Blue, for example—and fell in love with the writing. A quarter of the way through the book, I adored each character, and connected with Mira, the narrator and protagonist. Kephart’s mesmerizing writing, wonderful characters, and themes of strength and endurance thrilled me from beginning to end ... Read the full review
ONE OUT OF TWO, a novel By Daniel Sada, reviewed by Kim Steele
Daniel Sada’s One Out of Two is beautiful and bizarre. The novel, translated by the prolific Spanish-to-English translator, Katherine Silver, follows the Gamal sisters, furiously hard-working and identical middle-aged twins who work as seamstresses in the small town of Ocampo, Mexico. A sign hanging in their shop reads: “WE ARE BUSY PROFESSIONALS. RESTRICT YOUR CONVERSATION TO THE BUSINESS AT HAND. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB US FOR NO REASON. SINCERELY: THE GAMAL SISTERS.” These women have no patience for the dilly-dallying or the gossip of their fellow townspeople. Instead, they are content—at least initially—to focus almost entirely on their work, “without so much as a twinge of longing, confident that their daily and incessant toil will yield wonders, that good fortune is bound to result from great effort…” ... Read the full review
QUIET CREATURE ON THE CORNER, a novel by João Gilberto Noll, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer
Though João Gilberto Noll has published nearly twenty books, Quiet Creature on the Corner is his first to be translated into English (by the talented Dr. Adam Morris). A five-time recipient of Brazil’s prestigious Prêmio Jabuti, Noll lives in Porto Alegre, which also happens to be the hometown of Quiet Creature’s narrator—an unemployed poet who finds himself in jail for raping his young neighbor, Mariana. But then, in a bizarre sequence of events, the poet is soon removed from jail and carted to the Almanova Clinic before then being moved yet again, this time to the mysterious household of Kurt, a German Brazilian, for whom the classic laws of life—time, money, aging, purpose, etc.—no longer seem to apply ... Read the full review
THE CLOUDS, a novel by Juan José Saer, reviewed by Justin Goodman
Proust creates a time and place that is both familiar and palpable. Saer does nothing of the sort: a fictional village with a dramatized horizon overcast with pervasive isolation. And yet, it’s an equally genuine exploration of the difficulties of talking about the past, “where no one ever goes” (an obviously ironic claim for a memoir). “The past is a foreign country,” in the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Betweens, “they do things differently there.” The Clouds, beautifully, warns us there might not be a “there” to turn back to at all. For Saer, who stayed in Paris until his death, this certainly was the case ... Read the full review
HOLLOW HEART, a novel by Viola Di Grado, reviewed by Jeanne Bonner
Viola Di Grado, an exciting new Italian literary voice, begins her novel Hollow Heart with this sentence: In 2011, the world ended: I killed myself. In fact, the book is narrated by a dead woman, Dorotea, who describes exactly how she killed herself and why (she drowned herself in the bathtub after a romantic breakup). Then Dorotea, a grad student living in Catania, Sicily, draws the reader into life after life with a dark, daring approach that attests to Di Grado’s penchant for innovation and invention ... Read the full review
OBLIVION, a novel by Sergei Lebedev, reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf
There are (supposedly) only two types of narratives. The first is the story of a person going on a journey. The second, a kind of inverse of the first, is the story of a stranger who comes to town. Whether or not you subscribe to this idea of only two narrative types (I, personally, do not), the journey narrative is one of the oldest and most human stories in all of literature. And because “the journey” is such a familiar kind of story, those novels, stories, or memoirs that take that motif and spin it in new and interesting directions also dramatically reshape the parameters and expectations of literature ... Read the full review
EDIE (WHISPERING): POEMS FROM GREY GARDENS by Sarah Nichols reviewed by Allison Noelle Conner
The cover of Sarah Nichols’ latest chapbook is evocative. How do its images prepare us for what’s inside? We are presented with an oversized sun hat and mirror. At first I thought the mirror was a magnifying glass. A beginning note informs us that the text is sourced from Grey Gardens, the documentary directed by Albert and David Maysles. The 1976 cult film profiles Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and Edith “Little Edie” Beale, two eccentric former socialites who are noted for being Jackie Onassis’ aunt and cousin, respectively. Together they live in relative isolation amongst raccoons, cats, and fleas at Grey Gardens, their dilapidated 28-room estate in East Hampton, NY. Over the years the women, particularly Little Edie, have become camp icons, remembered as precocious misfits shunned by (or shunning?) upper class morality and ethics. Despite their precarious living situations, the Edies make time for singing, for dancing, for costumes, for pontification, for recalling. Under their rule, Grey Gardens transforms into a space of performances and guises, a seemingly eternal stage ... Read the full review
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BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL, a novel by Elliott Chaze, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
Elliott Chaze's novel Black Wings Has My Angel explores a brilliant but fatal partnership between two criminals bent on committing the perfect heist. “Tim Sunblade”—not his real name—escapes prison with nothing but his wits and a foolproof plan for a high-end robbery. His first week back in civilian life, he hires Virginia, a “ten-dollar tramp” who is not only more than what he paid for, but more than he bargained for. “What I wanted was a big stupid commercial blob of a woman; not a slender poised thing with skin the color of pearls melted in honey.” It isn't exactly love at first sight, but Tim finds Virginia absolutely irresistible ... Read the full review
DON'T THINK, stories by Richard Burgin, reviewed by Lynn Levin
Don’t Think, Burgin’s newest collection of short stories (and his nineteenth book), is one of his very best. The author’s straightforward and suspense-driven storytelling voice is as compelling as ever, the stories somewhat spooky and darkly comic. They give you the willies and keep you coming back for more. But Burgin, in this latest collection, demonstrates a new empathy for his characters. This notable evolution gives the characters softer landings and a fuller resonance in the reader’s imagination ... Read the full review
A FIERCE AND SUBTLE POISON, a YA novel by Samantha Mabry, reviewed by Allison Renner
Lucas Knight and his father come to Puerto Rico every summer from Houston, Texas. Lucas’s father transforms abandoned, historical buildings into extravagant resorts, while Lucas is content to find trouble with his friends—at least until he’s old enough to take over his father’s business ... Read the full review
VOICELESS LOVE, poems by Katherine Brueck reviewed by Johnny Payne
In her collection Voiceless Love, Katherine Brueck takes to heart her idol Wroth’s enjoinder, finding a personal path to “abusing the sight” with dexterous sleights. Her preface lays out nakedly the autobiographical aims of the book, as something of a manual of solace, rooted in her contemplation of a stark and painful family life, softened somewhat by marriage, an adopted child, and God. There is a pilgrim’s progress explicit in the structure of the book as it moves from friends and lovers through spouse and child and finally to God the crucified. Yet in this age of over-explaining in all literary genres, and gratuitous self-revelation masquerading as confession, Brueck constantly reminds us of the virtues of decorum and the tactical advantages of careful prosody ... Read the full review
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THE USES OF NATURE: DISTANT LIGHT by Antonio Moresco, HALF-EARTH by Edward O. Wilson, EVERYTHING I FOUND ON THE BEACH by Cynan Jones, and HILL by Jean Giono, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
The magic of discovery presses against the melancholy of the ruins. We are like a pair of naturalists who’ve discovered a lost link in the evolutionary chain, a last survivor of a species thought extinct. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book, Half-Earth, calls this the “Lord God moment.” We find a wooden trunk with “A.H. Whetstone” and her address thick-inked by a nineteenth century hand, a plastic portable church organ keyboard in the springhouse, a carpet of rust growing on a Zenith turntable tangled in the weeds outside. Water rushes through the handsome stone channel of the spring. The farmers must have dammed the creek to build the channel. When it was finished, they let the water loose, yet no longer wild. Now, it escapes unseen into the valley ... Read the full review
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OPERATION NEMESIS, a graphic narrative by Josh Baylock reviewed by Jesse Allen
Written by Josh Baylock, drawn by Hoyt Silva, and produced by David H. Krikorian, Operation Nemesis is the story of the early 20th century Armenian genocide and the tale of the eventual murder of that genocide’s architect. While this is a tale of Turkey’s then leader and dictator Talaat Pasha’s annihilation of over one million Armenians during World War I, the story of that atrocity unfolds through the trial and eventual acquittal of the assassin, Soghomon Tehlirsan. Historically rich, this graphic novel reads like a storyboard to a cinematic rendering of this tragic narrative. Each panel is vivid in its noir presentation: dark but flush with rich tones, stark and at times brutal, but firmly recounting an important story ... Read the full review
BABOON, short stories by Naja Marie Aidt reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer
Bestiality, child abuse, love, depression, heartbreak: these are among the many subjects brought to life in Naja Marie Aidt’s story collection, Baboon. Aidt, born in Greenland, a resident of Brooklyn, writes in the intersection, the most dangerous part of the street. Her stories stand boldly in the overlap of the ordinary and the absurd, between the wondrous and the vile. Brave and masterful, it’s no wonder Aidt has won both the Pen Literary Award and the Nordic Council Literature Prize ... Read the full review
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Y.T. by Alexei Nikitin reviewed by Justin Goodman
In one devastating visual from the 2011 British television miniseries The Promise, a veteran of the Israeli armed forces shows the unaware protagonist the tragedy of the border between Israel and Palestine. As the series progresses—switching between the present time and that time which the protagonist’s grandfather spent in Post-WWII Israel as a British peacekeeper—the pathos of this divide becomes mired in historical and social realities beyond obvious resolution. This quagmire of a divided land is a familiar theme for our time. Ukrainian physicist-cum-entrepreneur-cum-author Alexei Nikitin’s novel YT specifically reminds us of the case of his country, whose Maidan revolution in 2014 tried to answer encroaching Russian imperialism. Nikitin’s novel is set both in 1984’s Soviet-dominated Kiev and the democratic Kiev of 2004, its miasma of paranoia accompanying everything Soviet and everything political markedly similar to the Israel-Palestine of The Promise. In everything, a line ... Read the full review
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PATIENCE, a graphic narrative by Daniel Clowes reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore
Patience demands to be read twice: first, as a who-done-it, and second, as a who-are-you. On the surface, Daniel Clowes has written a murder mystery. When newlywed Jack Barlow finds his pregnant wife, Patience, dead in their apartment, he begins an obsessive hunt to identify her killer. He hires a private investigator. He time travels into her past, attempting to understand who could enact such violence. He begins a journey into the wide expanse of what he never knew about his wife—a terrain that expands for years. This is a story about meeting the person you love much later than you’ve started to love them, and that is the energy that propels the reader forward—hunting for Patience’s killer, yes, but digging for something much deeper ... Read the full review
SEEING OFF THE JOHNS, a young adult novel by Rene S. Perez II reviewed by Leticia Urieta
In the Texas town of Greenton, the talented few become mythical figures in the eyes of the locals, leaving those outside the spotlight to contemplate where they stand in the scheme of small town life. This could be a familiar story about growing up in someone else’s shadow, but, in this case, Seeing Off the Johns explores what happens in the aftermath of disaster; the loss of young life on the cusp of greatness. Jon Robison and John Mejia, or “the Johns,” as the Greentonites call them, are two high school sports stars who receive scholarships to play baseball for the University of Texas at Austin. The day they prepare to leave town is met with celebration and sadness as they two young men sever ties and move on from the place that nurtured and worshipped them. On the way to Austin to move into their dorm rooms, the Johns’ tire blows out on the highway, killing them both in the crash ... Read the full review
FORTUNE'S FATE, a very long novel by Miriam Graham, reviewed with great forbearance by Flair Coody Roster (April Fools Issue)
Although I have never personally met Miriam Graham, I learned everything about her that I could possibly wish in what is her debut (and hopefully only) novel, Fortune’s Fate, forthcoming this August from Unreal Imprints. As a veteran reviewer, I no longer assess a book by its contents. (All of the best authors are dead, except for TuPac.) Instead, I take a long, hard look at the author's bio. The bio is the hardest thing to write—harder than a 100,000 word novel—and reveals more than most writers intend. Graham congratulates herself on her participation in several mid-tier workshops (tuition, not merit-based), name-drops a few nobodies, and dribbles out some gratitude for the emotional support provided by her eight Persian cats. None of this is important or interesting. The photo, however, says it all. Graham's deep-set, cowardly eyes told me at once that I was in for a massively disappointing read, and that I should probably contact my therapist because Graham looks a lot like my mother and I was feeling very triggered ... Read the full review
THE BENEDICTINES, a novel by Rachel May, reviewed by Melissa Sarno
Rachel May’s The Benedictines opens like a film. There’s are white-capped mountains and rolling hills, narrowing into focus on a Benedictine school campus where our narrator, Annie James, teaches writing. It’s on this campus where we tour her emotional landscape, as she struggles to understand her relationships with others, as well as her own religious faith, within the structure of Benedictine life. Told through a series of vignettes, we puzzle together Annie’s life at the school, where she sits at a remove from those around her. We slowly learn about her students, her “Devout Roommate,” some of her suitors, the monks, and the staff. May intersperses excerpted chapters from The Rule of Saint Benedict, faculty handbooks, memos and emails from the school, and the haunting story of Mr. Souci, who died, mysteriously, three years prior. We stand at a distance from Annie, watching the lives around her evolve, as she tries to find her place among them ... Read the full review
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DEAD MAN’S FLOAT, poems by Jim Harrison, reviewed by Clare Paniccia
I have read Jim Harrison’s 18th volume of poetry twice: once at the end of winter and then again on the day following the poet’s death. Harrison’s themes of mortality, a lust for living, the pleasures of the body in nature, and a fascination with the violence of being remained constant between both of these readings, pulled along by a consistent flow of lush imagery and language that attaches itself to the dialect of the everyday. What changed, however, was Harrison’s almost elegiac, almost premonitory tone: these are poems that have erupted forth from their speaker to mark the very essence of passion and understanding—that life, in all of its intricacies, is finite and unchanging, and one must always heed to the beautiful fury that is the natural and forward-moving world ... Read the full review
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KALEIDOSCOPE, poems by Tina Barr, reviewed by Jeff Klebauskas
With the slightest rotation of its cylinder, a kaleidoscope provides altered views of the loose bits of glass that make up its interior. Tina Barr’s latest collection, the aptly titled Kaleidoscope, applies these slight rotations to the entire world, focusing on human experience—beauty marks, blemishes, and all. From the first line, “As I turn the chambered end,” the reader is sucked into a realm of time and tone-shifting fantasy that manages to stay grounded by direct, no-nonsense accounts of the author’s surroundings. Barr constantly changes directions, as the nominal theme suggests. She takes us to a jewelry shop on the corner of Al Muezz in Egypt, to the Golden Moon Casino in Mississippi, and to a nightclub where a jazz band, “hunts music that weaves itself through air.” This is just a small example of how far the reader mentally travels when reading Kaleidoscope ... Read the full review
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THE OVEN, a graphic narrative by Sophie Goldstein, reviewed by Brian Burmeister
Recently nominated for the Cartoonist Studio’s Prize for Best Print Comic of the Year, The Oven is a wonderful example of character-driven science fiction. In what might take a typical reader less than one minute, author/illustrator Sophie Goldstein quickly, yet carefully, establishes both the setting and a compelling story. From the very first page, Goldstein introduces the reader to a dystopian world in which futuristic cities are shielded from an ultra-lethal sun by protective domes. On the same page, one sees the protagonists, Syd and Eric, a young couple, leave that society for the communal, technology-free living of “the Oven, AKA ‘Babyville,’” a small settlement far from government’s reach—a community of people hoping to find simple pleasure from simple living. With displays of daily life in the Oven, Goldstein focuses her narrative around themes of family and freedom. The couple’s reasons for leaving their lives in the city quickly emerge and their quest for the life they have dreamed of is swiftly met with unforeseen obstacles. Life in the new world of the Oven isn’t easy. Syd and Eric find that “freedom isn’t free”—that, whether raising children or farming for sustenance, it requires hard work and commitment ... Read the full review
AGONY, a graphic narrative by Mark Beyer reviewed by Helen Chazan
It’s difficult to write about any individual Mark Beyer comic. His works return to the same characters, motifs and events, so particular to his voice that a broad description of a Beyer comic can just as easily describe his entire oeuvre. Beyer draws nihilistic stories about life going from bad to worse, usually focusing on Amy and Jordan, a couple whose life is beyond bleak. His art is childlike and dementedly unreal; bizarre forms and wonky perspectives, complemented by obsessive, handmade stippling, create an atmosphere of fanatical intensity. The language of Amy and Jordan stories are almost drab in their bluntness, adding to the overall sense of unreality. It’s a world of disaster that is both terrifying and hilarious at once. A typical Amy and Jordan panel shows the two menaced by some strange-looking knife-wielding monstrosity, arms in the air, flatly screaming “aaaahhhhh!” ... Read the full review
ON THE RUN WITH MARY, a novel by Jonathan Barrow reviewed by Ava Van der Meer
Little can mirror the hyper-exaggerated, hypersexual imagination of Jonathan Barrow’s On the Run with Mary—an engaging picaresque with perversely comic undertones. To be sure, this rendition of the 20th century is definitely not for the faint of heart and far from your run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story. Don’t expect any topic to be off-limits as you join a young, jaded schoolboy as he flees from an elitist English boarding school to brave the streets of 1960s London. Befriending a talking 34-year-old dachshund named Mary, the narrator navigates a luckless, schizophrenic world of substance abuse, evil headmasters, bodily excrement, and sexual licentiousness. Dead rats are crowded on quickly passing trains, terriers commit suicide by jumping off the Waterloo Bridge, and entire busloads of strangers defecate on each other. Taxi drivers are paid in sexual favors, priests are burned alive in crematoriums, and schoolchildren swim in sewers with frogmen. Time and time again, the narrator is sexually abused by his superiors as he runs from the large metal “hook” of his eccentric former headmaster. Barrow discards logic and common sense, subverting normalcy with a sense of paranoia and morbidity that is only occasionally punctuated by small snippets of unreciprocated kindness ... Read the full review
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CONFESSIONS, a novel by Rabee Jaber reviewed by Justin Goodman
Virility—that most male of virtues—is the heart of American war literature; Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming learns patriotism in the face of bullets, Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim explores his sexual energy amidst the Dresden Bombing, and Tim O’Brien’s Jimmy Cross is both distracted and driven by his hometown romance. There isn’t much virility in Maroun, the twitchy and vaguely traumatized narrator of Rabee Jabar’s Confessions, however. That’s probably attributable to the hydra that was Lebanon’s Civil War, around which the novel circles. And circles. And circles. And while the spiral, as it too often does, must end somewhere, you can be sure it ends prematurely. Nonetheless, this baroque mania is Confessions most powerful trait, transforming a straightforward family drama into the search for First Causes that war induces in us ... Read the full review
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A MAN LIES DREAMING, a novel by Lavie Tidhar reviewed by Kylie Lee Baker
A MAN LIES DREAMING by Lavie Tidhar Melville House, 294 pages reviewed by Kylie Lee Baker When a novel opens the gates of Auschwitz, we expect to be moved by a tale we've heard a hundred times before; we expect to see Eli Wiesel searching for his father's emaciated body in the snow; we wait for Oskar Schindler to brush snow from his car and then realize that it is not snow but the ashes of burned bodies; above all, we anticipate a tale that unites us in our hatred of Nazi Germany and makes us weep for the injustices inflicted on the Jewish people. A Man Lies Dreaming is none of these things, and never brings us down the path we expect. This is Lavie Tidhar's third novel, published in Europe in 2014 and now released in America, winner of the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, A Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of the Year, a Scotland Herald Best Crime Novel of the Year and a British Fantasy Award nominee. A Man Lies Dreaming follows Wolf, a private detective who flees from a concentration camp in Communist Germany and works in 1930s London among Nazis and fascists. He is ... Read the full review
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Louder Than Everything You Love, poems by Nicole Rollender
Nicole Rollender ELJ Publications, 120 pages reviewed by Camille E. Davis In her debut book of poetry, Louder Than Everything You Love, Nicole Rollender introduces herself as a voice that is polyphonic, startling, and necessary for the modern audience. When a contemporary woman is bombarded with messages that she cannot control her body, Rollender reaches through time to remind women of their own fierce strength. Rollender does this by considering prominent Biblical women, Rollender’s female ancestors, and her own daughter. She achieves this by deeply inquiring into her own faith, heritage, and even her mortality. The true elegance of Louder is in the way it slowly opens, as if Rollender’s neo-confessional speaker were quietly opening up her chest cavity, so that the reader could see her very bones moving. Rollender realizes this feeling through a masterful sense of pacing, an ambiguous temporality, and a lyricism that is gorgeous, haunting, and moldering. I say this because the poems in Louder frequently place the reader in very pastoral landscape, where things may bleed and die in a wooded bush, but where the reader cannot fully track if it is taking place in the past, present, or future. This affect culminates in a ... Read the full review
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A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS, a novel by Sasha Sokolov reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke
A School for Fools does not immediately strike a modern reader as new or groundbreaking; its central premise is that the narrator, a male youth attending a school for the insane, is unreliable, territory well-tread by canonized authors and Intro-to-Fiction students alike. Perhaps the original novel by Sasha Sokolov preceded (or at least coincided with the origin of) the pervasive cliché of the asylum story, having first been published in 1976, but a reader of this new translation by Alexander Boguslawski can hardly be blamed for her skepticism after glancing at the book’s back-cover blurb. As the asylum motif becomes apparent in the text (the speaker and his alter ego discuss appointments with Dr. Zause, interrupt each other, etc.), trepidation is unavoidable ... Read the full review
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BURN BABY BURN, a young adult novel by Meg Medina reviewed by Rachael Tague
BURN BABY BURN by Meg Medina Candlewick Press, 305 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague New York City is one of my favorite places to visit. I adore Broadway, Times Square, and ice skating at Rockefeller Plaza. But thirty-some years ago, the Big Apple was not the magical tourist attraction it is today, especially if you had “the wrong skin color or a last name like López.” Disco, dancing, free love, and women’s rights typically define 1970’s America, but, for Nora López, New York City in 1977 means arson, looting, serial murders, a struggling mother, and an increasingly dangerous brother. In Burn Baby Burn, acclaimed children’s and young adult author Meg Medina presents a strong female protagonist in one of New York City’s most tumultuous years. Nora should be able to look forward to college, boys, and an all-night dance party with her best friend Kathleen to celebrate their eighteenth birthdays. She should be care-free, dancing to Parliament, Heatwave, the Ramones, Donna Summer, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. Instead, she’s worried about police brutality, scorching summer temperatures, and navigating the dangerous suburbs of NYC as an attractive young Latina in a sea of sickos and psychos like Sergio, the drug dealer ... Read the full review
GOOD ON PAPER, a novel by Rachel Cantor reviewed by Lillian Brown
From Rachel Cantor, the lauded author of the 2014 novel A Highly Unlikely Scenario, comes a novel of New Life, a journey of personal resurrection, Good on Paper. Much of the novel is a meditation on fidelity, in relationships and in translations, and it brings to the page some of the most interesting personalities and family dynamics so far this year in literature. The characters and their relationships make this story of literary delight: Shira, the protagonist, a translator and single mother; Ahmad, her gay best friend and co-parent; Andi, her young and sharp daughter; Romei, the illustrious, Nobel prizing-winning poet, both on the phone and the page; Benny, the owner of the neighborhood bookstore People of the Book, publisher of the local literary magazine Gilgul, part-time love interest of Shira, and the very person to connect Shira and Romei. Good on Paper serves as a reminder of the power of connections, between both people and words. A PhD dropout and SuperTemps veteran, Shira spends much of her time contemplating the impending Y2K (the novel is set in the late nineties) and the nature of love in its various forms, when she receives a mysterious telegram. The note is from ... Read the full review
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THE GIRL IN THE WELL IS ME, a middle years novel by Karen Rivers, reviewed by Rebecca Lee
We’ve all experienced the feeling of being stuck. Whether it’s situational or emotional, sometimes it feels like there is no getting out of the dark tunnel that lies ahead. In The Girl In The Well Is Me by Karen Rivers, the main character, Kammie, is literally stuck in a cold, dark, tunnel with no way out ... Read the full review
THE ETERNAUT, a graphic narrative by Héctor Germán Oesterheld reviewed by Natalie Pendergast
Deadly, beautiful “flakes” falling gently, the bodies they touch folding neatly to the ground. The light thrower, a powerful weapon that spotlights your death, as though stage fright wasn’t real enough. Sinister devices “plugged in” to the necks of robot men, long before The Matrix was even a twinkle in the Wachowski Brothers’ eye. All of these: combining to form layers of artful threats to your well-being, like different sections of an orchestra imbricated and inter-punctuated to form a unified song. This is the world we enter upon reading the Eternaut’s, also known as Juan Salvo’s, recounted story. More: hallucinogenic, mind-controlling biological warfare, the telecommunication gadgets that dreams are made of, fifth column military pursuits by alien “hands,” enraged “gurbos” and an enemy automaton disguised as an attractive woman. A faraway extraterrestrial empire has designs on colonizing not only as many planets as possible, but also on pillaging the galaxy’s resources by picking pockets of time throughout eternity. Navigating this same eternity is the Eternaut. A displaced person in space, he borrows somewhere to sit from other slots in time, so as not to allow for his own vanishing. Set in “today”—or late 1950s Buenos Aires—The Eternaut, both man and ... Read the full review
BLOOD HYPHEN, poems by Kenny Williams, reviewed by J.G. McClure
Frost said that, like an ice cube on a hot stove, a poem must ride on its own melting. It’s an apt description of the poems in Kenny Williams’ Blood Hyphen, winner of the 2015 FIELD Poetry Prize. Take the book’s opening poem, “About the Author,” which begins: The genius of Diogenes: all his books are lost. But really that’s the genius of the books and not the man. If I can speak for the man, his diet of worms and onions makes me feel like a pig when I go to the store and it’s midnight and the store is closing. Riding on its own melting, the poem proceeds by continuously undermining itself. The genius of Diogenes isn’t really the genius of Diogenes but rather the genius of his books—all of which are lost. So to be ingenious, a piece of writing should not exist—a darkly funny argument that undermines the very act of writing the poem in the first place. The speaker then proposes to “speak for the man” Diogenes—but does no such thing, instead talking about his own experience in the grocery store ... Read the full review
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ALMOST EVERYTHING VERY FAST, a novel by Christopher Kloeble, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
Like the best coming-of-age stories, Christopher Kloeble’s Almost Everything Very Fast addresses universal concerns by asking personal questions. Nineteen-year-old Albert, raised in an orphanage, wants to know why he was given up by his anonymous mother and the father he knows: Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes, a grown man with a childlike mind. Albert has gotten nowhere by following the “Hansel and Gretel crumbs” he’s found in Fred’s attic: a photo of Fred with a red-haired woman, a few auburn hairs plucked from a comb. When Fred’s terminal illness imposes an urgent deadline, Albert visits him in Königsdorf one last time—but his “infinite questions” lead to still more questions: What is love? In what ways do family ties bind us? Is nurturing natural? Do parents cause their children more harm than good? In Segendorf, Fred’s ancestral village, to love is to discard. For nearly 400 years, residents have been compelled to hurl their Most Beloved Possessions off the rocky bluff of the highest hill at the annual Sacrificial Festival. During one such celebration in 1912, incestuous (and murderous) twins Jasfe and Josfer Habom conceive a son, Julius, whose birth brings shame but also relief: the baby is not a “Klöble”—the local term ... Read the full review
ENIGMAS, poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reviewed by Justin Goodman
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz remains Mexico’s greatest mystery. Born in 1651 out of wedlock and between social classes, intensely devoted to knowledge—having had discussions with Isaac Newton—and to Catholicism, she died forty-four years later despised by the male authorities of the church, but canonized as part of the literary godhead of the Spanish Golden Age. The haziness of these seeming contradictions evoked in the glorious 20th century Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, a sensation of the enigmatic which he captured in “Wind, Water, Stone”: “Each is another and no other.” It’s appropriate, then, to see Enigmas publication; it is a work whose title is a reflection on both de la Cruz’s existence and poetry, and also on the amorphous gulf between language and meaning that translators of poetry attempt to concretize. At least that’s what Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal seems to get at in her manifesto-ish “Translator’s Not-(Subtractive Letter).” Much as she describes her aesthetic decisions, “through Neo-Baroque deletion of first person yet a postmodern acceptance of my identity,” the note evokes the characteristically astringent intellect of poststructural feminism. Also in Villarreal’s note, she insists her “polar associations to sound and form” embodies Gloria Anzaldúa.” I could go deeper down ... Read the full review
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IN OTHER WORDS, essays by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed by Michelle Fost
In Other Words, a departure for Jhumpa Lahiri as she turns for the first time to memoir, took shape as weekly writing assignments—in Italian—that were published over six months in the Italian magazine Internazionale. Regular deadlines and the constraint of writing in a language she was still learning re-energized Lahiri. These very personal pieces are framed and contained self-portraits. They are fascinating, focused, and at times repetitive, and give the sense of a complex literary artist with a passion for language. Part of Lahiri’s accomplishment in In Other Words is her recovery of a way of working that is unspoiled by the expectations of a demanding readership. I thought of a story told to me by an early childhood educator about a child who loved to paint. An adult, looking at the child’s work asked, “Is that a flower?” Is that the sun? What a beautiful yellow.” For weeks, the child, now self-conscious, did not return to paint. Lahiri’s project is a return to a literary garden, a place where she is free to play with language and expression in a way that is full of joy, discovery, and personal satisfaction. Lahiri generously invites the reader to share this pleasurable ... Read the full review
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A 52-HERTZ WHALE, a YA novel by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman, reviewed by Kristie Gadson
A 52-HERTZ WHALE by Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman Carolrhoda Lab, 197 pages reviewed by Kristie Gadson When a humpback whale becomes separated from its pod, it emits a unique song in an effort to find its way back to its loved ones. When certain people experience feelings of isolation, they seek companionship through indirect social interaction. Bill Sommer and Natalie Haney Tilghman's A 52-Hertz Whale explores the nature of loneliness through a series of email correspondences, all between people with little else in common other than the desire for understanding. From the conversations of these starkly different people springs a series of beautiful, if uncanny, friendships. A 52 Hertz-Whale reveals that some of the most meaningful relationships can be forged even when the only thing we have in common is the fear of being alone. Fourteen-year-old James Turner ("[email protected]") sends his first email after discovering that his adopted humpback whale, Salt, was separated from its migratory pod. Recent film graduate Darren Olmstead ("[email protected]") receives the long email detailing James' efforts to uncover the lost whale’s whereabouts, and a plea for Darren's assistance. What a kid from a middle school social skills class wants with the guy who volunteered ... Read the full review
THE LAST WEYNFELDT, a novel by Martin Suter, reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer
THE LAST WEYNFELDT by Martin Suter translated by Steph Morris New Vessel Press, 302 pages reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer Martin Suter’s The Last Weynfeldt is an impressive work of intrigue and beauty. It sparks at the intersection of two very different people, Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, internationally renowned art expert, and Lorena, a shoplifting, small-time model who rips Adrian from his carefully crafted still life. Adrian earns his living by putting a “fair” price on beauty, authenticity, and originality. Lorena, often an anonymous commodity as a model, is also a thief, a woman who never pays society’s agreed upon price. And it’s through these differences—along with a whole host of other artists, liars, grifters, and moochers—that Suter brings out the novel’s central conflict between authenticity and forgery, the mass-produced and the one-of-a-kind. Of Lorena, Suter asks what does it do to a person to be dismissed as little more than copy or commodity: In the streetcar to the exhibition center [Lorena] took a free newspaper from the dispenser and sat down cautiously on one of the hard seats. Her picture was on the cover. Wrapped around the Ducelli in a provocative pose, with a seductive look for the camera. The caption ... Read the full review
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ABDUCTING A GENERAL, a memoir by Patrick Leigh Fermor, reviewed by Rory McCluckie
ABDUCTING A GENERAL by Patrick Leigh Fermor NYRB, 206 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie In 1933, aged only 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Clad in an old greatcoat and a pair of hobnail boots, he had left his native England on the deck of a Dutch steamer and set off on foot with a few letters of introduction, some notebooks, and a copy of Horace's Odes in his rucksack, It was an extraordinary thing to undertake but we've long known that Leigh Fermor was an extraordinary man; a skilled linguist, a vivid, ebullient writer, and a lover of literature, people, and the world in all its variable wonder—of life, essentially—he has become celebrated for enjoying an existence so improbably charmed that his travel books often read like stirring, romantic fictions. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Leigh Fermor—then living in Romania—returned home and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the Irish Guards, a posting he quickly came to regard as dull. It was with some relief, then, when the Intelligence Corps took note of his lingustic capabilities and offered him courses in military intelligence and interrogation before dispatching him, in ... Read the full review
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HERE COME THE DOGS, a novel  by Omar Musa, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
HERE COME THE DOGS by Omar Musa The New Press, 330 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster You had to be there. Right? That's how these things work—the magic of moments strung together, a shared lexicon, the bond of shared origins. Omar Musa's brilliant first novel Here Come The Dogs unpicks the rough, multifaceted hip-hop culture of small-town Australia. Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both a snapshot of a specific time and place, and an examination of the broadness of humanity, Here Come The Dogs is filled with stinging insights, delivered in freestyle and lyric prose. In hip-hop, context is everything. Those who know, know. Inside that world—word battles and swag weed—a man can be a prince if he spits good rhyme. Outside, it's a different story. The guy dominating the mic last night is waiting to wash your car windows this morning. Who is underneath the shiny props and thick black tattoos? Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks—one Samoan, one Macedonian, and one unknown—waste time being cool in small ways. They're half-assing it, diverting their hustle to greater things in the way that artists do. One ... Read the full review
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A GIRL ON THE SHORE, a graphic narrative by Inio Asano, reviewed by Helen Chazan
A GIRL ON THE SHORE by Inio Asano Vertical Comics, 406 pages reviewed by Nathan Chazan In a 2013 interview, Inio Asano cites learning the phrase “chunibyo” as an inspiration for A Girl on the Shore. A Japanese meme, “chunibyo” translates roughly to “Eighth Grader Syndrome,” and describes an early adolescent’s tendency to aspire to and imitate the adult behaviors that she is too young to understand. The comic, a direct and emotionally intense story about two early adolescents who enter a sexual relationship, functions as a parable of “chunibyo,” exploring this youthful desire to seem more mature as well as its consequences. In contrast to this motif, A Girl on the Shore is a deceptively mature accomplishment, employing the techniques of commercial manga to the greatest level of sophistication to convey the searing anxieties of adolescence. This is a graphic novel about two teenagers, Koume and Keisuke, who decide to start having sex when they are very young. Both are haunted by recent trauma: Koume by her rape at the hands of a popular kid named Misaki, and Keisuke by the absence of his deceased older brother. The two youths enter this relationship believing it will be strictly sexual, ... Read the full review
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE, a graphic narrative by Riad Sattouf, reviewed by Jesse Allen
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE by Riad Sattouf Metropolitan Books, 160 pages reviewed by Jesse Allen As a memoir of childhood, color plays a prominent role in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. Different locations and environments take on a range of hues, beginning with the blunt red-black-and-green cover. On it, Gaddafi’s handsome and commanding image on a billboard salutes Riad’s parents as they walk past while he, uncolored, rides his father’s shoulders. He looks to the salute as if it were another adult doting on him, a golden haired child. Over the course of the memoir, scenes that take place in France are colored in blue, while those in Libya and Syria are colored in yellow and red respectively. Reds and greens also offset memories when contrast is needed to elicit a moment of childhood awareness: the red of Riad's father Abdel’s radio announcing the political news that directs Abdel and his family’s life, green signaling a televised broadcast of Gaddafi’s state speech in Libya as well as the angry words of a Libyan waiting in line for state rationed bananas, which, too, are colored green, and red for Syrian army berets and broadcasts of Hafez al-Assad’s state ... Read the full review
OUT OF DARKNESS by Ashley Hope Pérez reviewed by Leticia Urieta
OUT OF DARKNESS by Ashley Hope Pérez Carolrhoda LAB, 402 pages reviewed by Leticia Urieta Out of Darkness is broken into parts: before the disaster and after. This compelling novel is rooted in history, and the book begins with the aftermath of the 1937 New London school explosion in East Texas and a town reeling from disaster. Volunteers move debris, collect the severed limbs of school children, and build caskets for the dead. The narrative voice embodies the horror, the grief, and the growing need for someone to blame. This is how the story begins, with a sense of impending doom, and this feeling of dread pervades the rest of the novel, the “before”, leading up to the “after.” The story encompasses a school year, oscillating between the third person points of view of a family hoping to make a new start. Naomi Vargas moves to New London from San Antonio with her twin brother and Sister, Beto and Cari, to live with their father, her stepfather, Henry Smith. From the beginning, the rules are clear; no Spanish at school or around town; watch where you go; attend church revivals and socialize with the locals. New London is an oil ... Read the full review
LOSE 7 by Michael DeForge reviewed by Helen Chazan
LOSE 7 by Michael DeForge Koyama Press, 52 pages reviewed by Nathan Chazan The most recent installment of Michael Deforge’s one-man anthology series Lose features three new stories from the artist: two shorter pieces surrounding a longer work, which form a sort of triptych. Unlike earlier issues, Lose 7 lacks a subtitle alluding to a loose theme connecting the stories within (“The Fashion Issue” and “The Clubs Issue”). But if I were to choose a title for this seventh issue I might go with “The Growing Up Issue”, or perhaps “The Dysphoria Issue”. The three stories reflect how identities are constructed and the feelings of detachment and anxiety that accompany such journeys of self-definition. The first story, untitled in this volume but previously published on Deforge's Patreon page as “Adults”, depicts a children’s game in which a boy instructs a girl on how to pretend to be his mother. The two run through town proclaiming their false identities, fraught with the fear and excitement of fooling the outside world. The parody turns into a nightmare as the “mother’s” literally swelled head assumes and reverses the previously established power dynamic, becoming a brute force of the parental aggression the kids had ... Read the full review
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POENA DAMNI TRILOGY by Dimitris Lyacos reviewed by Justin Goodman
POENA DAMNI TRILOGY Z213: EXIT, 95 pages WITH THE PEOPLE FROM THE BRIDGE, 61 pages THE FIRST DEATH, 35 pages by Dimitris Lyacos translated by Shorsha Sullivan Shoestring Press reviewed by Justin Goodman “What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?” In France, in 1960, this question pressed itself upon the Romanian-born Emil Cioran. Histoire et Utopie was published, likely to the same acclaim (and rejection of acclaim) that marked all Cioran's career after 1950. Six years later and southeasterly, Dimitris Lyacos would be born in Athens. Despite the distance, Lyacos' recently translated Poena Damni trilogy revels inside Cioran's head. The composite units: Z213:EXIT, With the People From The Bridge, and The First Death, are ridden with the lack of euphony that belongs to the invisible canon of defeat to which Cioran belongs. Understanding is a place, for those of this school of thought, towards which knowledge only exacerbates the distance. The translator of the triology, Shorsha Sullivan, who is also a Classics professor at Leeds College, distinguishes Lyacos from the Greek poets that “slide easily into the mainstream of European Modernism” and those localized poets whom “lose [their] savour in ... Read the full review
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BREATH TO BREATH by Craig Lew reviewed by Heather Leah Huddleston
BREATH TO BREATH by Craig Lew Little Pickle Press, 432 pages reviewed by Heather Leah Huddleston Seventeen-year-old William has been dealt a bad hand in life. Raised for as long as he can remember by his grandparents, Gramps dies and G’ma can’t take care of him, so William is shipped from Kansas to California to live with his estranged father. He has no real memories of his mother, except the fictionalized ones he makes up for his friends. And there’s this: he has a history of violence; he nearly killed someone in Kansas. The novel unfolds like both a mystery and a coming-of-age story as he tries to come to an understanding of who he really is. Though violence seems to follow him, we learn that the violence has a reason; he saves a girl from being raped; he saves a boy from being beaten by bullies; he saves himself after being finger raped by the captain of the football team. Within the gray area surrounding all the violence lies the question: is there ever a time when violence is okay? Or at least understandable? William’s sleep is haunted by nightmares of whales being hacked to death by faceless people ... Read the full review
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A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME by David Gates Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages reviewed by Jeanne Bonner A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a short story collection that offers a rare pleasure: the possibility of reading it cover to cover, leaping from one story to the next. Some readers, including this one, may want to protest the gallery of rogue characters David Gates presents in this new collection perhaps enough to wonder who Gates hangs out with. I’m reminded of the scene from the film Ocean’s 11 when Julie Roberts’ character says to George Clooney, who plays Danny Ocean, “Your problem is you’ve met too many people like you.” Some of these characters’ habits and inclinations, reflections and bitter asides, are just this side of depraved (or perhaps for some people, the other side of depraved). Indeed, the people in Gates’ stories can wear a bit, with their biting sarcasm and world-weariness. Yet there is no denying the sure hand behind these stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Gates knows his characters so well that the descriptions and stories feel chiseled like sculpture. In the case of Lily, the ... Read the full review
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Carey McHugh
AMERICAN GRAMOPHONE by Carey McHugh Augury Books, 72 pages reviewed by Clare Paniccia In approaching Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone, one might first consider this question: What is the song of America, or American culture? It’s easy to jump to the obvious conclusions—the United States has strongly defined itself through its velocity, whether in industry, technology, or commercial growth, and its music has become largely representative of these themes, with contemporary pop artists representing the almost-electric shine of the digital age, rock bands highlighting the working-class, and country groups crooning over the “loss” of an easy-going, slow-paced lifestyle. Beneath these surface associations, however, McHugh challenges our initial question with a more stripped-down idea—what if America’s song isn’t something you can quickly flip to on a radio? What if America’s song is something that deviates completely from the mainstream—something pared to its most visceral form: an instrumental, organic, and natural tone? Think of the vibrating note of a fiddle, the deep strum of a guitar, and bare, haunting vocals. The sounds of folk and Americana that seem to eek out of valleys, creeks, and forgotten forests—quietly shivering their way into the undercurrent of the American everyday. These are the notes that wind ... Read the full review
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WAR, SO MUCH WAR by Mercè Rodoreda TRISTANO DIES by Antonio Tabucchi A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION by José Eduardo Agualusa THE THINGS WE DON’T DO by Andrés Neuman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin WAR, SO MUCH WAR by Mercè Rodoreda, translation by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennant Open Letter, 185 pages TRISTANO DIES by Antonio Tabucchi, translation by Elizabeth Harris Archipelago, 192 pages THE THINGS WE DON’T DO by Andrés Neuman, translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia Open Letter, 190 pages A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION by José Eduardo Agualusa Archipelago, 246 pages Once in a while a writer speaks to me as if we are in a kind of private ecstatic embrace. That is the kind of reader I am: thirsty for intimacy, for communion. In dialogue, I answer back as best I can. I spent much of last year with Traveler of the Century (FSG, 2012), Andrés Neuman’s lost and found allegory of the nineteenth century, bildungsroman of modernity, eyes tearing with fraternity. Here was the brother (older and wiser) of Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), a novel I had published the year before. Now Neuman has nudged me into a new conversation, about constructing narrative, in a series of conceptual stories and experimental situations collected in The Things We Don’t Do, in the English translation by ... Read the full review
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Masks and Icons
MASKS AND ICONS by R. Daniel Evans Blurb, 82 pages reviewed by Shinelle Espaillat In his fourth poetry collection, Masks and Icons, R. Daniel Evans examines the complexity of love and desire, and exposes the ways in which these emotions both intersect with and deviate from each other. Evans brings a microscope to the multiple small evidences of love in the world, using the lens of art to view the beauty and pain of interpersonal connection, inviting readers to look through the mask of the self and perceive the extraordinary. Section I, “From The Land of Walt Whitman,” focuses on the intimacy and inner-life of a speaker’s relationships with individuals, beginning with a one-sided conversation with Whitman himself. The narrator sits on a beach, fairly melting with desire over a distant beauty to whom he never speaks, but whom he imagines as Whitman’s muse. He wonders how, with such an object of desire near him, Whitman “ever got any poems written,” noting, in this metaphysical moment, that desire is an obstacle to his own work. Sexual desire, then, is all-consuming, and the speaker suggests that poets instead mine the world at large for the rich possibilities of interaction, with the ... Read the full review
CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG reviewed by Justin Goodman
CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG edited by Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz Coffee House Press, 160 pages Cat-is-art Anonymous' Internet Rule 38: “one cat leads to another.” This rule is played out, true to form, within the universe it governs. I think of Douglas Davis’s classic “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” which (half Mobius Strip) perpetually leads, and (half Internet) begins with “cat purring softly”; or, in the same vein, the more contemporary “Drei Klavierstücke op. 11” by Cory Arcangel, composed of cat-on-piano videos molded into Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music. The Internet seems to have returned us to what Schoenberg’s contemporary, the painter Gustav Klimt, asked with his bijou palette and bourgeois nudes: when does something exit coincidence and enter art? As with Klimt's regal-looking prostitutes, we might ask, where is the line between artistic intention and the more accidental capturing of internal feeling? Now, amidst a flurry of cat media, editors Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz have gathered the work of 14 authors to discern meaning in the paw swipes virtuosity. The work is gathered in the collaborative Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong ... Read the full review
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Stumbling out of the Stable
STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE by Sean Pravica Pelekinesis Press, 436 pages reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer In his short stories, Sean Pravica often prefers the magical real and the weird over realism. In his debut novel Stumbling Out the Stable, however, Pravica steps up to a more classic literary endeavor: to find (and not shy away from) meaning in the everyday. For Pravica’s characters in Stumbling, this “meaning” is found between the gods of order and chaos—not simply in their conflicts, but in the strange beauty of their creative harmony. The novel crackles with the nervous energy of this crossroads between order and chaos, between the dream of freedom and the fear of aimlessness, between the desire for something new and the temptation to remain safe in practical routine. It is at this crossroads that Pravica introduces us to his leading men, the debt-riddled college student-philosopher-photographer Seamus and Seamus’ best friend, Jamie. “What if taking neither path was the best decision?” wonders Seamus, “The more as well as the less traveled were both born from the same split decision. What if movement was nipped in the bud? Was that not It, content already, seams tied shut, wounds healed, stasis realized?” The ... Read the full review
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Fat City
FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner introduction by Denis Johnson New York Review Books, 191 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster We steal. Writers do. A good writer is a magpie, searching other people's sentences for something that glimmers. A good writer reads with a jeweler's loupe. Close reading, and the willingness to borrow shamelessly from other people's works, is what differentiates the casual writer from the serious writer. Very serious writers find other writers' reading lists, and read them. And then those writers' lists, their influences. And so on back. Read up the chain. Understanding what a writer reads, and how they read it, can give deep insight into the craft of storytelling. But getting inside means finding the book that matters most; the one that changed everything. Fat City by Leonard Gardner is one of these. It's cited as a major influence by writers like Denis Johnson and Joan Didion. Ever heard of it? Me neither. Like its main characters—two perpetually out-of-luck boxers—Fat City is the best book you've never read. It resists hype in a way that's refreshing. In an age that lives for the reboot—J.K. Rowling's return to YA fiction, Harper Lee's lost manuscript, yet another volume ... Read the full review
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KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern reviewed by Rachael Tague
KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern Red Hen Press, 146 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague Randy Ray McKenzie received the nickname General Custer because Junior Malstrom always thought Randy was galloping Strawberry, the one-eyed horse, into disaster. And perhaps, on the day General Custer agreed to race the old horse against a junkyard Ford on a rarely used, viciously windy airstrip in the California seaport town of Fairhaven, he was indeed galloping into disaster – or at least over the edge of a sand dune. The General moved to Fairhaven in the middle of second grade, which “is like playing 52 Pickup with all your people and things. When you try to collect them and put them back together, you can’t, because they are somebody else’s people now and somebody else’s things.” Fairhaven was different from the General’s grammar school back in Oregon where little John and Marnie “could kiss just like Hollywood stars at the end of a movie,” and Hugh Taylor did not get in trouble for yanking the new Egyptian student off his swing by the ankle. The Fairhaven school had nutrition and physical education instead of morning and afternoon recess, the first through third graders ... Read the full review
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A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE by Beth Vrabel reviewed by Mandy King
A BLIND GUIDE TO STINKVILLE by Beth Vrabel Sky Pony Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 288 pages reviewed by Mandy King A Blind Guide to Stinkville is a story told through the fuzzy eyes of 11-year-old Alice, whose albinism and near blindness give her the unique perspective to uncover hidden stories of the people in her new town. The genius of Vrabel’s approach is that the reader meets the other characters through nuances of feelings and impressions rather than stark physical descriptions. The book is not a page-turner plot-wise and there are no major catastrophes; instead the novel peers beneath the superficial to reveal important lessons about what it means to be a member of small town community. Despite the fact that Alice has to use a magnifying glass to read a book a few inches from her face, she is the only person in the story who truly sees what is going on around her. Initially, Alice thinks her new hometown of Sinkville, aka “Stinkville,” is a horrible place dominated by the terrible smell emanating from the local paper-mill. It’s nothing like where she grew up in Seattle. It smells foul and everything is different ... Read the full review
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THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN by Micol Ostow and David Ostow reviewed by Rachael Tague
THE DEVIL AND WINNIE FLYNN by Micol Ostow illustrated by David Ostow Soho Teen, 326 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague I don’t like to be scared. I can’t stand that chill-in-the-air, breath-on-my-neck, sweat-in-my-palm terror that comes with horror stories. The last time I tried to read a scary book, I was twelve, and I flipped to the epilogue before I was halfway through to relieve the tension. That’s the only time I’ve ever read the end of a book without reading everything in between. But if I had the option to stop in the middle of The Devil and Winnie Flynn, I would have given up during the séance in the criminal ward of an abandoned insane asylum. As it was, I had to shut the book, take a breath, and reorient myself to reality before I could continue with this creepy tale. Brother-Sister duo Micol and David Ostow (So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother)) team up for the second time to write and illustrate The Devil and Winnie Flynn, packing the pages with ghostly spirits, exorcisms, demons, psychics, and all manner of haunted locations, its characters seeking communion with the dead and the damned. Cleverly ... Read the full review
CALIGULAN by Ernest Hilbert reviewed by J.G. McClure
CALIGULAN by Ernest Hilbert Measure Press, 96 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure From his debut Sixty Sonnets to All of You On The Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert has made a name for himself as a dedicated formalist. His latest, Caligulan, is no exception: you’ll find no free verse here. Hilbert is at his best when the content of the poems plays against the formal constraints. Take “Barnegat Light,” for instance: The gull pulls bags from trash and drags them clear. He’s big as a cat, a blur of snow and soot. He pokes until debris spills down the pier. He’s clumsy, and somehow he’s lost a foot. Chewed off? A winter fishing line? Wedged in boards? The stump’s a small sharp spear that stings the bird If ground is touched. He soars to foggy scree, Alights but flaps to halfway hang in air, spurred By pain to perform endless pirouettes. The tightly elegant form contrasts perfectly with the unsettling pain and violence of the scene described; one senses the formal control is the only thing between us and the chaotic world the bird inhabits. It’s hard not to read this as an ars poetica: the bird has lost a foot ... Read the full review
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TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz reviewed by Rory McCluckie
TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz NYRB, 215 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie Whatever else it might be, Talk is the bearer of a remarkably terse and comprehensive title. Has there ever been a work that so accurately summarizes its contents in so short a space? In four letters, Linda Rosenkrantz encapsulated the interior of her 1968 literary experiment immaculately; this is a book of talk. All 215 pages are repositories of speech, unadorned by scenic description or third-person agency. What's more, they're pages of genuine talk, not a word of it imagined or fabricated. Over the summer of 1965, Rosenkrantz decided to capture the conversation of friends on tape, a process that eventually lead to her picking out three personalities, and presenting their interactions in the form of a “novel in dialogue.” Stephen Koch's introduction fleshes out the context: “I had the tape recorder running all summer,” Rosenkrantz recalls, even dragging the bulky monster to the beach. At first there were about twenty-five different characters and fifteen hundred pages of single-spaced transcript, which I took close to two years honing down to the three characters and two hundred fifty pages. Quite the project, in other words. A little later in this ... Read the full review
INK AND ASHES by Valynne E. Maetani reviewed by Leticia Urieta
INK AND ASHES by Valynne E. Maetani Tu Books, 380 pages reviewed by Leticia Urieta Valynne E. Maetani’s debut novel, Ink and Ashes, begins with the narrator Claire’s eerie statement: “I stared at my pink walls, wishing away the smell of death. I imagined the wispy smoke snaking its way through the narrow spaces around my closed door, the tendrils prying at tucked away memories.” This observation cements her voice as protagonist, a mixture of sensitivity, uncertainty, and fierceness. As the smell of incense wafts up to her room – part of a ritual to honor her father since his passing ten years ago – she struggles to reconcile memories of her father with what she later discovers about him. And it’s this powerful voice that leads us through a heart-pounding narrative journey, exploring the nebulous nature of memory and trauma. At seventeen, Claire deals with the typical issues of a teenage girl: homework, relationships with boys, and overprotective parents. Still, her life is colored by the loss of her father. Looking back through his old journal, Claire discovers a mysterious letter from her father addressed to her stepdad George, whom she believed her father had never met before. Suddenly, ... Read the full review
PUNK ELEGIES by Allan MacDonell and DADDY Madison Young reviewed by Johnny Payne
PUNK ELEGIES by Allan MacDonell Rare Bird Books, 306 pages DADDY Madison Young Rare Bird Books, 323 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne “Let my heart tell you what prompted me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only mischief that made me do it.” Thus spoke Saint Augustine of Hippo, and with those words, invented the confessional memoir and spawned the talk show in which the recounting of misdeeds leads—it is hoped—to self-reflection, repentance and salvation. When you put the peccadillos in print, it is difficult to escape this literary paradigm, for, as with Augustine’s sins (and our own), the more you struggle, the more surely redemption will drag you toward a hopeful destiny, like the mighty Mississippi at flood tide, and you borne aloft on your own self-damning words. Two such memoirs have just been issued from Rare Bird Books. The first, Punk Elegies, is the sometimes desultory, occasionally comical, and moderately self-aware account of Allan MacDonell’s drugged and drunken misbehavior as a skilled yet dubious reporter of punk music for Slash magazine in Los Angeles, present at what is dubbed the birth of stateside punk, via a band called The Screamers. He has given himself ... Read the full review
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WAVELAND: One Woman's Story of Freedom Summer by Simone Zelitch reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
WAVELAND: One Woman's Story of Freedom Summer by Simone Zelitch The Head & The Hand Press 221 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster Any discussion of race is going to include a good story. Identity is organic; it's not semiotic, raised like softened noodles from a theoretical alphabet soup. Race is about how we relate to ourselves, to others, and how our stories mix together. Is it an educated, white woman's privilege to say that? Maybe. I can't see outside of myself, though I can admit my limitations. I wouldn't presume to take on another person's story, as that dishonors their experience. This dilemma—the quandary of the white liberal who genuinely wants to work for racial equality—is the piercing thread that runs through Simone Zelitch's fourth novel, Waveland. Set in 1964 and the decade that follows, Waveland brings the Freedom Summer to life. Young people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worked to register African-American voters in Mississippi. They set up Freedom Schools in church basements and back rooms and offered classes in civics and basic skills. They were beaten, arrested, and disappeared. The mixed group, SNCC, was real—not imagined—and when Zelitch starts blurring the lines of history with ... Read the full review
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KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf
KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa translated by Wiesiek Powaga New Vessel Press, 107 pages reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf Andrzej Bursa was born in Krakow on March 21, 1932, seven years before the German invasion of Poland. He died of congenital heart failure at age twenty-five on November 15, 1957, just after Poland began to overthrow its totalitarian system of Communist rule. Bursa lived in a time that shifted dramatically from extreme suppression to extreme expression, misinformation and propaganda to jazz and poetry. His literary career began on the heels of the post-war period of Polish literature noted for an emphasis on “Socialist Realism,” but was cut short at the emergence of an era of national sovereignty that prompted an explosion of avant-garde art, performance, literature, and music. Bursa’s only novel, Killing Auntie, was not published during his lifetime. The novel takes place over the course of a week, during which a young man named Jurek whacks his aunt in the head with a hammer and then attempts to rid himself of her corpse, a more difficult task than he imagines. While it doesn’t ever do anything, or say anything, everything Jurek does is in reaction to the corpse. This is ... Read the full review
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DIORAMA by Rocío Cerón reviewed by Johnny Payne
DIORAMA by Rocío Cerón Phoneme Press, 145 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne Cerón’s creation can best be described thus: she summons words. Like iron filings to a magnet, they come into an order that feels inevitable. Pulsar body, delicate hibiscus flowers or mangrove Palm: residual beauty of misery/ In this penchant for naming, her exquisite and casual catalogues could pass as still life. But her poetry, technical yet drenched in sensation, scientific yet opulent in the manner of natural history, is propulsive, as she pushes herself, and us, to the far limit of the mind’s ken. In “Sonata Mandala to the Penumbra Bird,” echo seems to precede sound: Hyperboreal smell: wild mist of civet musk. Body’s simple landscape, dermal aura, death. Scent of tea and points of star. Affect falls dense, and what might feel like lacunae or mere white space in the work of another poet, figures as sensation. Feeling crowds and suffuses each gap. It is not so much a matter of a reader making logical leaps (though they can be made) as it is of following the quick pulses that run through the lines. Politics figure as oblique, yet Cerón is quite capable of brief, cutting critiques ... Read the full review
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FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays by Timothy Kenny reviewed by Beth Johnston
FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays by Timothy Kenny Bottom Dog Press, 144 pages reviewed by Beth Johnston In the preface to Timothy Kenny’s new essay collection, Far Country: Stories from Abroad and Other Places, Kenny links his stories to the new journalism of the 1960s, the work of “Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion.” Yet although Kenny positions himself as Didion, personal and revealing, he more often echoes New Yorker journalist John McPhee. His essays hold back, shield the author’s character, and confess little. The best of them capitalize on Kenny’s strengths: carefully observed detail, compelling stories, and flair for sentence. But only a few of them require Kenny to risk baring himself and his responses to distant places. Kenny is a former USA Today journalist and a journalism professor who has worked abroad since 1989. He’s seen a lot: Belfast during the Troubles, Berlin right before the wall fell, Sarajevo during the siege, and Kabul as Afghanistan is rebuilt. He’s interviewed Vaclav Havel in Prague and fought off feral dogs in Kosovo. His character feels like the movie version of a Western journalist abroadhe’s Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously or Stephen ... Read the full review
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SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems by John Wieners reviewed by J.G. McClure
SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems by John Wieners Wave Books, 216 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure I’ll admit upfront that, prior to receiving Supplication, Selected Poems of John Wieners, I knew very little about Wieners or his work. Biographically, I knew he was a Beat Poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance. The only poem I knew was the titular poem of this selected, “Supplication”: O poetry, visit this house often, imbue my life with success, leave me not alone, give me a wife and home. Take this curse off of early death and drugs, make me a friend among peers, lend me love, and timeliness. Return me to the men who teach and above all, cure the hurts of wanting the impossible through this suspended vacuum. This is Wieners at his best. The first stanza shows his trademark gifts: a willingness to use an elevated rhetoric that risks—and resists—sentimentality, and a powerful longing for what cannot be. How is poetry to provide success, companionship, marriage, a home? Wieners knows as well as the rest of us that it doesn’t work that way. In the second stanza, we see Wieners wrestling with another of the primary concerns in his work – ... Read the full review
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THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL by Bohumil Hrabal reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL, novelas by Bohumil Hrabal translated by James Naughton NYRB Classics, 299 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Late summer might be the best season to read Bohumil Hrabal, for time reveals itself in the ripe air and everything bleeds with life. Hrabal, the Czech novelist of delirious syncopation, who died in 1997 falling from a fifth floor hospital window while trying to feed the birds, returns to childhood in these two novelas about the manager of a small-town brewery, his older brother, savage wife, and young son. Hrabal’s stepfather was the manager of a brewery; Maryška, the wife of Francin, the fictional brewery manager, narrates the first novela, Cutting It Short. Their son is the narrator of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still. When Cutting It Short, which Hrabal published in 1976, opens, Maryška, is lighting the lamps, waiting for Francin to come in from the brewery. “I dread the day,” she says, “the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with the round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, ... Read the full review
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LONG WALK TO VALHALLA by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox reviewed by Brazos Price
LONG WALK TO VALHALLA by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox Archaia, 96 pages reviewed by Brazos Price In Long Walk to Valhalla, a graphic novel by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox, we follow a young man named Rory as he winds his way back through memories of his childhood in rural Arkansas. Rory and Joe are brothers, but so much more. Rory is Joe’s protector. Joe has difficulty speaking and is prone to strange trances in which he sees visions of "Pretty Things," surreal-looking creatures that are not exactly monsters but certainly not part of the normal landscape of Arkansas. Because of Joe's peculiar malady, he is vulnerable to worlds both real and (perhaps) imagined. This is a story of growing up and the sadness that accumulates along the way. The story begins when Rory’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. He has only three contacts, all three of whom we meet during the course of the narrative, and no money to make a call. Then Sylvia appears from within a corn field near where Joe is stranded. She claims to be a Valkyrie out of Norse mythology, sent to take Rory off to Valhalla, the land where ... Read the full review
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THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth Graywolf Press, 365 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster As I write this, the white half of the world is up in arms about a lion, killed on the other side of the globe. Black protestors in Ferguson stand in lines, chanting the names of the dead. Videos are released of police officers assaulting, maiming, and shooting unarmed black citizens. The temperature soars to 165 degrees in Iran. This summer has been too hot, a climate sweating for change. It is the oldest story: the new idea comes, and grinds the good old world into dust. And another idea on top of that, invaders with new languages and new philosophies. Not all new ideas are good; genocide is one of them. We're still seeing the systemic elimination of natives from their own land, in the United States and elsewhere. Sacred tribal lands are sold to copper mining companies. Lakes where gods once rose to give prophecy, poisoned by industrial waste. The crushing disappointment of our modern losses is brought to life in The Wake, which takes place in England in 1066 A.D. Awakened to the impending disaster of the Norman Invasion, Buccmaster of Holland begins ... Read the full review
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THE TREE WITH NO NAME by Drago Jançar reviewed by Justin Goodman
THE TREE WITH NO NAME by Drago Jançar translated by Michael Biggins Dalkey Archive, 274 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman Contention over millennials’ degree of entitlement hasn’t been limited to the United States. As we learn from Slovenian writer Drago Jançar, in fact, the generation gap has an equally special significance in the former Soviet Bloc, where, according to translator Erica Johnson Debeljak, writing on the Dalkey Archive Press website, the “new generation…takes independence and freedom, the Slovenian language, and shopping malls to be their birthright.” Communism is outdated. That’s why The Tree With No Name is so timely. The issue is not simply post-birth pangs (Slovenia was established in 1991 with the USSR’s collapse). Rather Jançar asks, what is there for the old generation in a new world? To Janez Lipnik, the archvist protagonist who’s preternaturally incapable of letting go of the past and which he belongs to, it’s all that’s left. “Wherever there is no past,” he thinks, “the world is fundamentally unreal.” The overarching dread of becoming a living artifact overcomes Lipnik after his wife, Marijana, points out a women’s bicycle that is pulled from “the poor river whose bad luck it was to run through the ... Read the full review
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Four Novels from Unnamed Press reviewed by Johnny Payne
THE PAPER MAN by Gallagher Lawson Unnamed Press, 267 pages REMEMBER THE SCORPION by Isaac Goldemberg translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler Unnamed Press, 133 pages THE FINE ART OF FUCKING UP by Cate Dicharry Unnamed Press, 230 pages ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD by Saad Z. Hossain Unnamed Press, 304 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne The wryly-named Unnamed Press out of Los Angeles is living the self-appointed paradox of making a name for itself. Any independent press walks the line between sufficient eclecticism to draw in a swath of curious readers, and a strong enough identity to stand out from the pack. Unnamed Press has achieved this goal with a set of spanking new novel releases: Escape from Baghdad, Remember the Scorpion, The Paper Man, and The Fine Art of Fucking Up (possible best title of the year). A decided taste rules the selections: There is snappy dialogue. “He’s a sullen little shit, but his work’s pretty good;” “All of Lima smells like a woman in heat.” “I dream only in American.” There is narrative pith. The first, brief paragraph of The Fine Art of Fucking Up reads: I am sitting behind my desk watching the downpour when I catch ... Read the full review
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CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley reviewed by Lynn Levin
CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley Southern Illinois University Press, 310 pages reviewed by Lynn Levin We live in an era of border crossings. In marriage, family, race, gender, and geographical boundaries, our world is more than ever about blending, bridging, transforming, and migrating. Frontiers are shifting in literature, too: the move is on toward hybrid and blurred genres—prose poems, flash fiction, videos, and other experiments in expression. Into this climate of mixing and crossing, comes Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley (SIU Press, 2015). The book details the many ways in which creative writing instructors are crossing boundaries: for example, using compositional strategies in the creative writing classroom. The twelve essays in this book are rich in theory, research, practical ideas, and in-the-trenches know-how. The contributors are academics who are also poets and writers. They all specialize in teaching creative writing, composition, and/or literary studies. Many of the essays captivate with inspired ideas. A few, aiming for the scholarly, rely a little too much on academic jargon and buzzwords. All in all, I found a raft of useful crossover and new-generation ... Read the full review
ARE YOU SEEING ME? by Darren Groth reviewed by Allison Renner
ARE YOU SEEING ME? by Darren Groth Orca Book Publishers, 278 pages reviewed by Allison Renner Books are often seen as a respite from everyday life and road trip books can be an even greater escape. They let you travel without having to go through airport security or get stuck in a strange city's traffic. Darren Groth’s Are You Seeing Me? takes readers from an Australian airport to several stops in Canada and the United States, journeying alongside nineteen-year-old Justine and her twin brother, Perry. The trip is a big undertaking, but it’s meant to be a send-off, a farewell to the lives the twins have always known. Justine and Perry’s father died a year ago and, since then, Justine has been Perry’s caregiver. Before his death, their father secured Perry, who has autism, a spot at an independent living facility. Justine is conflicted: Perry says he wants to move away; her boyfriend wants to move in; and she can finally live a life without caring for a brother with disabilities. But she doesn’t really mind taking care of Perry, and worries that he’ll forget about her as he establishes his own independent life. She knows how to prevent his ... Read the full review
A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene Burlesque Press, 189 pages, 2015. reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa In the very first scene of A House Made of Stars, Tawnysha Greene’s debut novel, the ten-year-old narrator and her sister are awakened by their mother, who spirits them to a darkened bathroom where all three sit in the bathtub, towels piled over them, while the house shakes with thuds so loud even the narrator’s deaf sister can feel their vibrations. Their mother tells them it’s a game. She tells them they’re practicing for earthquakes. But even at ten, the narrator knows it’s not nature’s rage they need to fear. It’s their father’s. Greene’s voice in this novel is pitch perfect, an eerie and convincing combination of innocence and prescience. The hard-of-hearing narrator is homeschooled and isolated; her mother believes public schools will not teach “Godly things.” Yet her understanding of their family dynamic and her father’s mental illness are intuitive and profound. Without adult labels or filters, we see his depression, his paranoia, his moments of happy, expansive mania that can change in an instant to brutal outbursts, and the scars he carries from his own violent childhood. We see her mother’s ... Read the full review
HAW by Sean Jackson reviewed by Michelle Fost
HAW by Sean Jackson Harvard Square Editions, 181 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Sean Jackson’s first novel, Haw, recently out from Harvard Square Editions, is an ecological nightmare narrative, the story of a world starved for clean water. When I first came across Jackson’s writing in his short story “How a Ghost Is Made” (in Issue 7 of Cleaver) I was impressed by Jackson’s snappy, lean prose style. In “How a Ghost Is Made,” Jackson portrays a woman who is in the process of pulling away from the husband who is cheating on her. We first encounter Shelly while she is out for a run. As Jackson describes: “She leans into the next turn, bursting up Spindale Street like they taught her at Oberlin: run till you can’t think straight, then back off one gear.” The anger in the story moves similarly—high throttle, then backing off just enough. Shelly runs in a lush setting and her anger as she moves towards her emotional leave taking gives the story a satisfying, raw, unbridled energy. Shelly’s external world—her surroundings on her run—appears full, but her internal world feels stripped down, impoverished, giving some power to her reaching out in memory (however feebly) ... Read the full review
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HOW TO BE ANOTHER by Susan Lewis reviewed by Carlo Matos
HOW TO BE ANOTHER by Susan Lewis Červená Barva Press, 81 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos In How to be Another, Susan Lewis explores the full range of the prose poem form. These poems read like short speculative essays in the tradition of Montaigne, which is to say they have a metaphysical or epistemological bent to them. “Most knowing goes unlicensed,” says the speaker archly in “Introduction to Appreciation.” We are not dealing in this book with the esoteric details of autobiography or memoir but with the broader experiences of humanity as a species. How to be Another isn’t concerned with the kind of surface empathy or watered-down existential day-seizing of self-help books (as the title might suggest) but is instead a work of anthropology—though, clearly, these perspectives must intersect to some extent. For example, the speaker of “Introduction to Narcissism (III)” says, the “point is, self-awareness confers little evolutionary advantage. We are not wired for objectivity.” However, later in the same poem, the speaker acknowledges that the “pain” caused by self-awareness “is relentless, staying with you longer than any friend or flattering memory.” The shift to the second-person pronoun is telling for although the “you” is largely rhetorical in ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
TOUCHÉ by Rod Smith reviewed by Brandon Lafving
TOUCHÉ by Rod Smith Wave Books, 112 pages reviewed by Brandon Lafving Poetry these days is unglamorous, but at least it’s fun. At most, it’s fun. Rod Smith’s Touché plays, but you would have to call it mischievous because it hits you with über grit, and not one punch is held back. “Everything I have written is trash. I have not / even the strength to love. Let it go.” The blunt emotion of these lines is the impulse of “Buoyancy”—the cathartic moment of a tormented artist who is filled with self-hatred and guilt over his inability to love a woman more than his work, and his work at all. The pathos is so real to me—the hapless raising-onto-pedestal of a woman—the inevitable transition to thoughts of writing: “I have to write past this obsession / with you, Nora, with an invalid / admiration in the learning. You’ve / got the idea. I’m a calf. & the victory / of the light. // Does it go on? The poem I mean.” I am pretty sure I felt this way last week. Touché, indeed ... Read the full review
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DOCTORS by Dash Shaw reviewed by Brian Burmeister
DOCTORS by Dash Shaw Fantagraphics Books, 96 pages reviewed by Brian Burmeister What is it that awaits us after death? In his graphic novel, Doctors, artist/writer Dash Shaw creates a world in which each afterlife is unique, generated from one’s own memories with assistance from a newly-invented medical device, the Charon. Throughout Doctors, Shaw showcases skillful storytelling. The world he creates is inventive and fascinating. From the beginning, he successfully pulls in the reader with the story’s sense of mystery. One quickly wonders what is real as the initial central character of Miss Bell struggles to make sense of a series of confusing events in her life. As the story surrounding Miss Bell unfolds, we learn that doctors have created (through the Charon) a way to prolong life after death, allowing one’s consciousness to live on temporarily in a joyous modern-day Elysium. Within the afterlife, doctors are able to communicate with the deceased and, when successful, are able to compel the person to return to the land of the living, at least for a limited time ... Read the full review
A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls reviewed by Rory McCluckie
A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls translated by Ellie Robins Melville House, 197 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn't fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it's central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker's guitar case, it's difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls is an Argentinian novelist, essayist, and critic who has been writing fiction for years while holding various academic and editorial posts in Argentina and the United States. Indeed, he seems to be so active and prolific in his various roles that it's perhaps surprising that Pauls' 2007 novel, The Past, has, until now, been his only work to have received an English language translation. With A History of Money, he should have assured that such negligence comes to an end. This is a skillfully realized work, as accomplished in its execution as it is acute in its criticism ... Read the full review
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YOU DON’T SAY by Nate Powell reviewed by Stephanie Trott
YOU DON’T SAY by Nate Powell Top Shelf Productions, 176 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott Given ten years, an artist can undergo a series of personal evolutions that may come to mark them as a master. Among these seasoned individuals sits Nate Powell, a graphic novelist who has been writing and self-publishing since the age of fourteen. His most recent collection, You Don’t Say, presents seventeen short stories written over the course of a decade that celebrate the range of realizations that contribute to our inevitable maturation. Targeting a young adult audience, these narratives are relatable to all who are in or beyond those infamous teenage years. From nights spent idling in barren parking lots to the realization that we will not forever willingly stay up past 3 A.M., Powell captures the a-ha! moments that come to define us as adults in the face of calendar rotations. Each installment features a brief text-based introduction that both describes the inspiration for the following piece and explains the comic in relation to the artist. Powell also includes suggestions as to how certain pieces should be read, asking the reader to consume several in one go or to allow features to work as ... Read the full review
SURVIVING SANTIAGO  by Lyn Miller-Lachmann reviewed by Leticia Urieta
SURVIVING SANTIAGO by Lyn Miller-Lachmann Running Press Teens, 312 pages reviewed by Leticia Urieta Many authors employ a tried-and-true formula for young adult novels with a female protagonist: girl is displaced for a period of time to live with a relative or parental figure from whom they feel disconnected, girl meets love interest, and adventure ensues. Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s Surviving Santiago, the sequel to her first novel Gringolandia, meets these expectations with the inclusion of some of these tropes: the displacement to another country, the disconnected parent, the dangerous love interest and the naïve teenage girl, but the novel partially subverts this formula. It explores complicated relationships and the self-empowerment that occurs when one accepts people for who they are. Christina “Tina” Aguilar is sent off to her homeland of Santiago, Chile for the summer at the insistence of her estranged father, Marcelo. It’s been eight years since she has returned to Chile after Marcelo was imprisoned by Pinochet’s dictatorship for his work with the Socialist underground. Tina leaves her friends and newly remarried mother in Madison, Wisconsin to stay with Marcelo and her Tia Ileana, her aunt and her father’s caretaker. Tina hopes that this will be a chance to ... Read the full review
SUPERIOR PACKETS  by Susie Timmons reviewed by Clare Paniccia
SUPERIOR PACKETS by Susie Timmons Wave Books, 181 pages reviewed by Clare Paniccia So often we find a characterization and romanticization of New York City within literature and film—the city forming a metaphor for struggle and loss and surrounding a scene with an obvious reminder that time (or taxis) waits for no one. If we close our eyes and imagine “New York,” we might see towering skyscrapers, new-age coffee shops serving only one type of organic bean, streets marred with the remnants of garbage and posters… This is the city that we know—the one that pulses continuously in our veins and invites a feeling of hunger or thirst, in that we cannot be satiated unless we are wholly involved in the movement, in “it.” I find it important to imagine my own relationship to the city before interpreting Susie Timmons’ three-volume collection of poetry, Superior Packets, which takes on its own characterization of a late twentieth-century New York. Any place, the city or otherwise, can mold to the individual experience—within spaces and locales we encounter our own subjective realities that form the basis for our relationship to that particular environment. Out of these subjective events, these memories, we create our ... Read the full review
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THE ARGONAUTS  by Maggie Nelson reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
THE ARGONAUTS by Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press, 160 pages reviewed by Gabriel Chazan Sometimes an idea reverberates and echoes for a long time, like a song. This was my experience reading Maggie Nelson’s revelatory new memoir, The Argonauts, which starts with an idea Nelson found reading Wittgenstein: “the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed…”, and “its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.” Nelson wrote the book while she was with her partner, the non-binary trans artist Harry Dodge, and pregnant with their first child. At one level,The Argonauts recounts her experiences with Dodge, whose gender identity consciously resists the traps of language, and with parenthood. In attempting a reconciliation of the two perspectives, Nelson finds a freedom through language. More than simply telling a ‘story’, Nelson considers here the act of trying to bring experience into language and ideas, particularly those which seem to oppose this very act. She incorporates an array of ideas from theorists ranging from Judith Butler to Wittgenstein in order to consider the inexpressibles of gender, sexuality, joy, and the seeming contradiction of queer parenthood and marriage—an experience increasingly brought into the mainstream of social structures and away ... Read the full review
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TOMBO by W.S. Di Piero reviewed by Johnny Payne
TOMBO by W.S. Di Piero McSweeney’s, 63 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne Giacomo Leopardi speaks of two essential kinds of imagination: strong and promiscuous. The first is “weighty, impassioned, melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered.” The second is “playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited.” The W.S. Di Piero of The Dog Star, the one I first encountered as a reader, is of the strong variety, as in his depiction of a somber Whitman attending injured soldiers and offering introspection on a Civil War battlefield in “Walt, the Wounded.” A small fire still burns in the nursery. Rice and molasses simmer on the stove. Children will have to learn to ask for less, less from the elephant dawn that chilled across the heights where Lee held his ground. Or there is the dark homage “To My Old City”: “diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked / on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers / from the black newsstand.” In it, memory figures as corrosive. Surely all poets offer changes in mood, even within a single book, but underlying shifts in temperament happen over time, if at all. And with the appearance of Tombo, I ... Read the full review
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BETWEEN GRAMMARS by Danielle Vogel reviewed by Amanda Hickok
BETWEEN GRAMMARS by Danielle Vogel Noemi Press, 78 pages reviewed by Amanda Hickok It’s so often that a book of poetry can be thought of as a static object, a collection of disembodied words that are supposed to transcend the body and voice of their author on the page. And it’s so often that poets are bodiless, as poetry—no matter how much it is about bodies—must be divorced from its corporeal source and recipient; that a poet writes for an anonymous reader who in turn reads nobody behind their words. However, and perhaps ironically, poetry’s meaning comes at least in part from its resonance within these bodies, in its ability to stir in them a visceral reaction. Danielle Vogel knows this, addresses this with a forceful intimacy between poet, reader, and page that is both beautiful and challenging in a breaking-the-fourth-wall kind of way, in the vulnerability it necessitates that we are so often sheltered from. Between Grammars, a book-length poem, begins with an equation of text and body—epigraphs that include “we melt into each other with phrases… We make an unsubstantial territory,” from Woolf, and “Language is a skin,” from Barthes, and then a prologue in five volumes: body, ... Read the full review
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COUP DE FOUDRE by Ken Kalfus reviewed by Carolyn Daffron
COUP DE FOUDRE A Novella and Stories by Ken Kalfus Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages reviewed by Carolyn Daffron Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition. Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first time. Coup de Foudre tells the story of David Léon Landau, a character not-at-all-loosely based on French financier and former presidential hopeful Dominque Strauss-Kahn (known in France and now everywhere as “DSK”) who was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel in 2011. Although criminal charges were dropped, the case led to a civil settlement, various other scandalous accusations and revelations, and the ruin of DSK’s career. The novella is a first person account of the hotel assault and the events immediately surrounding it, written in the form of a letter to Mariama, the housekeeper-victim—a letter ... Read the full review
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THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat reviewed by Melissa M. Firman
THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat translated by Adriana Hunter Other Press, 189 pages reviewed by Melissa M. Firman How well do we really know the people we love? What happens when the family stories and personal histories we’ve grown up believing turn out to be fiction—or, at best, a version of the truth? These are the questions explored in The Travels of Daniel Ascher, the debut novel of Déborah Lévy-Bertherat. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, this is a quick, fast-paced read where much happens in this story-within-a-story novel. Hélène, a 20 year old archaeologist living in Paris, is a typical university student; she’s exploring her new city, falling in love with Guillaume, and occasionally babysitting a young neighbor boy. Among the few people she knows in Paris is her great-uncle, Daniel Roche, a famous author. His books, written under the pseudonym H.R. Sanders, are bestselling literary travel adventures with dashes of fantasy and mystery. (Think Harry Potter.) ... Read the full review
THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa
THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins Lacewing Books, 200 pages reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa When terrible acts of violence occur—as they do all too often in America—our thoughts naturally turn to the victims and their families. But what about the families of those who commit violent crimes? What if someone you grew up with was a school shooter, a terrorist, a mass murderer? That’s the reality fifteen-year-old Laney is living. Her brother West and his friend Mark, two high school outcasts, boarded a school bus armed with machetes, knives, guns, and homemade bombs. Six people died; twelve were wounded. Mark blew himself up, but West made his way home to kill his mother, and he would have killed Laney, too, if police hadn’t stopped him. Left with the wreckage her brother left behind, Laney feels completely alone, unwanted, even hated. Her father died when she was young, and her mother’s boyfriend is only interested in leaving the state as soon as possible. Strangers phone the house with death threats. This is her only identity now: the killer’s sister ... Read the full review
THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS by Ryo Yamaguchi reviewed by Johnny Payne
THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS Ryo Yamaguchi Noemi Press, 97 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne This chaste book could be titled The Story of O. Ryo Yamaguchi rhapsodizes, if more quietly, in the mood of Keats when he exclaims “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”: O machine, O accord, I no longer ask the things I need not ask . . . the slow atmosphere of story has refused too long to seat my rhythms, and I have refused to elaborate myself through its lines. His drama of sensate consciousness is based on the refusal (ergo the title) to follow the suit of narrative poetry, in favor of the mind’s free play. Yet one may legitimately ask, as we sometimes do of historical novels, whether the writer courts anachronism or rather renews the proposition. In the case of Yamaguchi, the answer is complex. Many times I found myself wondering whether this one-vowel incantatory tendency was a tic or sprang organically from what I am tempted to call “new lyric.” “O youth, o conflagration, O end of summer parking lots”; “O office of elaborate letters, O remark”; “O here is the work”; “O John the Baptist”; “O hybridized ... Read the full review
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ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND by Box Brown reviewed by Brian Burmeister
ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND by Box Brown First Second Books, 240 pages reviewed by Brian Burmeister For a generation of professional wrestling fans, Andre Roussimoff was a giant, both as a man (he stood seven-feet, four-inches tall and weighed 500 pounds) and as an icon (he was one of the most successful and beloved wrestlers of all time). In telling Andre’s story, author/illustrator Box Brown did his homework. A life-long fan of professional wrestling, Brown draws upon interviews with those who personally knew Andre as well archival footage in an effort to show a complete and accurate portrayal of Andre’s life in and out of the ring. Throughout Andre the Giant’s pages we see Andre as a young boy growing up in the French countryside, Andre as an up-and-comer in the professional wrestling circuit, and finally Andre the globe-trekking celebrity. Along the way, Brown gives life to dozens of anecdotes about the wrestler, moments ranging from playful to painful but always compelling and curious. For those less familiar with professional wrestling, Brown takes pains to make the material accessible. Throughout the course of the narrative, he includes a preface in which he imparts to the reader a useful ... Read the full review
BLACK RIVER by Josh Simmons reviewed by Stephanie Trott
BLACK RIVER by Josh Simmons Fantagraphics Books, 110 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott Despite society’s wonderment over advances of the human race, we are nonetheless fascinated by hypotheses of how the world may one day cease to exist. And while prophecies of rapture have yet to prove veritable, there exist countless fictional renderings of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The medium of graphic narrative has long played host to such tales, from the teenage plague that dominates Charles Burns’s iconic Black Hole to the psychedelic stylings of anarchist rebel Tank Girl. In this spirit comes Josh Simmons’s Black River, which follows a gang of five women and one man as they traverse a dormant planet void of laws and warmth. Led by the experienced Seka over the course of more than a decade, the group searches in hopes of locating the fabled city of Gattenberg—“walled in and completely self-sufficient, protected by sharp-shooters all around the city.” They are survivalists to the Nth degree, employing stockpiled supplies unused by those now deceased; their camaraderie is strong (as they quite literally sleep together in an attempt to stay warm through the night) and extends both to preserving life and taking it when necessary. The ... Read the full review
THE ART OF ASKING by Amanda Palmer reviewed by Justin Goodman
THE ART OF ASKING by Amanda Palmer Grand Central Publishing, 333 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman "Art is the Artist" I first heard of Amanda Palmer while driving a flashy, cherry red Mustang convertible blasting “Girl Anachronism” from a speaker system clearly not made to handle any song at full volume, let alone one already deafening at standard volume for an ipod-earbud combo. It didn’t help that it was my car, and that my first girlfriend and I were the ones in it. By 2009 a year had passed since Palmer’s band, the Dresden Dolls, broke up, and three years before she would give the TED talk that would inspire the memoir The Art of Asking. My relationship and my car had both broken down by that point and as I, that bachelor now in a minivan, would likely have said about Palmer’s memoir-essay, there is one thing the three have in common: they deeply affected my life, and then repeated themselves enough that I wanted them to be done with. Memoirs often annoy me, in part, because they take Whitman’s advice too literarily: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” And that’s not to ignore that such songs lend themselves ... Read the full review
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WHERE YOU END by Anna Pellicioli reviewed by Allison Renner
WHERE YOU END by Anna Pellicioli Flux, 299 pages reviewed by Allison Renner The trends of paranormal characters and dystopian worlds have played out in young adult fiction, just in time for Anna Pellicioli to step in. Her debut, Where You End, is a riveting work of contemporary fiction that will captivate an audience of both teens and adults. According to the blurb on the back cover, Pellicioli’s book is about a girl getting over a passionate first love. The Library of Congress summary on the copyright page would have us believe it’s about a girl who is blackmailed when she ruins a museum sculpture. Yes, Where You End is about heartbreak and blackmail, but it’s not the best way to summarize the story. The book doesn’t have a simple, common problem to solve with a few dramatic encounters or wrap up neatly with a life lesson. There’s more depth than that. A seventeen-year-old photographer, Miriam, is caught in emotional turmoil after seeing her ex-boyfriend with a new girl through the lens of her camera. Desperate to do something, anything, Miriam pushes a Picasso statue in the Hirshhorn Museum off its base. It falls and Miriam runs, glancing back to ... Read the full review
THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday reviewed by Michelle Fost
THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday St. Martin’s Press, 291 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost In Daniel Torday’s debut novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, two first-person tales wrap around each other. This intertwining is in itself fascinating, especially given that one of the strands is an account of a man who repeatedly pulls away from those he feels closest to, seemingly unable to sustain intimate connections. Torday begins the novel in the voice of Eli Goldstein, a Boston-area teenager who bears witness to the literary rise and fall of his adopted uncle, Poxl West. Eli finds his Uncle Poxl’s success as a writer absolutely thrilling. These two have a special relationship—they greatly enjoy each other’s company, going together to cultural events such as operas and symphonies—and, best of all, afterwards going out to Cabot’s for ice-cream, conversation, and the sharing of early drafts of Uncle Poxl’s writing in progress. Eli is Poxl’s first and probably most adoring audience for his book, Skylock: The Memoir of a Jewish RAF Bomber. Eli takes a lot of pleasure in following the book’s reception. After the memoir is reviewed in The New York Times, Eli imagines Poxl’s response to ... Read the full review
MENDELEEV’S MANDALA by Jessica Goodfellow reviewed by Camille E. Davis
MENDELEEV’S MANDALA by Jessica Goodfellow Mayapple Press, 102 pages reviewed by Camille E. Davis Jessica Goodfellow was trained as a poet and a mathematician. In an interview with The Japan Times, she admits that as a child she would “recite poems, usually rewritten nursery rhymes, where [she] would change the words to what [she] wanted…but with the rhythm of the rhyme behind it.” However, her family, though never precisely dampening her poetic spirit, pushed her to explore her natural ability in mathematics instead. She came to reconsider her career choice when she found herself deeply unhappy while pursuing a Ph.D. in microeconomics and econometrics at CalTech. So it is not surprising that Goodfellow is completely at ease when flirting with poetic mathematics. Her first book of poetry, Mendeleev’s Mandala, sprinkles logic equations to the meat of its poems. Goodfellow is interested in the crossroads where mathematical logic and history meet both free verse and more classical poetic forms. Split into five sections, Mandala also feels like a compilation of Goodfellow’s work. The fifth section incorporates Goodfellow’s first chapbook, The Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, and thus Mandala feels like a reverse chronology. A poem in the first section ... Read the full review
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RUNAWAY GOAT CART by Thomas Devaney reviewed by Anna Strong
RUNAWAY GOAT CART by Thomas Devaney Hanging Loose Press, 80 pages reviewed by Anna Strong Early in Runaway Goat Cart, the latest from Thomas Devaney, readers get a found poem of language that has come from a diary found in a darkroom at Moore Women’s College of Art, dated 1972. The writer of the diary is unidentified, though she records the speech of a few of her friends. One of these, Susan, from the haze of cigarette smoke and darkroom chemicals, offers two startlingly clear statements about photography and art that also serve as a guide to reading Devaney’s text. The first, dated November 9: Susan says it’s forbidden for our pictures to echo the objects they depict; nothing looks like that, she said, but it’s allowed, it’s allowed for the world to look the way it does. Fine words those. The second, dated less than a month later, reads: Prints are not reproductions. Susan said this is a mistaken idea. What you’re looking at is a photograph: how something looks there. Taken together, Susan’s sage advice about how to look at a photograph (or take a photograph) tells readers much about how to read Devaney’s poems. So many of ... Read the full review
FIRST YEAR HEALTHY by Michael DeForge reviewed by Travis DuBose
FIRST YEAR HEALTHY by Michael DeForge Drawn and Quarterly, 48 pages reviewed by Travis DuBose In Michael DeForge’s short, gnomic First Year Healthy, terse declarative prose is set alongside hallucinatory artwork to create a sense of unease and unreality that deepens over the course of the narrative. First Year Healthy is the illustrated monologue of an unnamed young woman describing her life after being released from psychiatric care for an unspecified “public outburst.” The details of the story are delivered flatly, no matter how outrageous or impossible, casting each new revelation in the same terms as the last. In fact, more emotional heft is given to the description of the narrator’s job gutting and packing fish than to her first bizarre sexual experiences with “the Turk,” the man she eventually moves in with. In contrast to the prose the artwork is vibrant and varied, with the open space of the backgrounds often patterned in abstract shapes and curlicues. It’s increasingly unclear as the story progresses whether what we’re seeing is simply stylized or a representation of the way the world actually looks to the narrator. A Christmas tree bears more resemblance to a haphazard pile of seaweed than to a ... Read the full review
THE SILVER SWAN by Elena Delbanco reviewed by Hannah Judd
THE SILVER SWAN by Elena Delbanco Other Press, 240 pages reviewed by Hannah Judd Elena Delbanco’s father was Bernard Greenhouse, cellist in the Beaux Arts Trio, and in this first novel full of musicians her lived experience brings authority to her descriptions. Her focus is on a father, Alexander, a famous cellist but distant man, and his daughter, Mariana, also a cellist, poised to follow in his footsteps as a soloist but derailed by crippling stage fright and an unhappy love affair. The cello promised to her since childhood, her father’s, is unexpectedly not left to her in his will: the reader is left to grapple with, alongside Mariana, questions of where love, art, and family intersect. What does it mean when a cello, an object, is the center of a story? What myths do instruments carry; and why do we value the old ones so highly? What does it mean when a father loves his career more than his family? How do we recover from blows dealt from beyond the grave? How do we mitigate the expectations of families to pursue our own passions? The cello that is the focal point of the novel is called the Silver Swan ... Read the full review
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ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren reviewed by Justin Goodman
ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 171 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman "The Irony of Nostalgia" From our Modernist forebears came an emphasis on the power of memory (think Marcel Proust). Yet they forgot to mention its overbearing sibling, nostalgia. Overbearing not only because it tends to act as “a screen not intended to hide anything–a decoration meant only to please the eye,” but also because it obscures history. In effect, it fetishizes the past. It makes Alexandria the “strange, nostalgic European landscape” of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer (translated for the first time into English by Yardenne Greenspan). One would expect an aestheticizing impulse of, as André Aciman informs in his introduction, a man who “aged ten…left his home on the Rue Delta in Alexandra” and then saw the military overthrow of King Farouk “dissolve all remnants of multi-national life in Egypt.” Alexandrian Summer is nigh a roman a clef, following the arc of the author’s life up to his fortuitous migration from this anti-Semitic cosmopolitan fantasy to Israel to join his brothers. Nonetheless, despite his intimacy with his history, Goren avoids any such pathos. All nostalgic bliss is converted to a ... Read the full review
SUPERMUTANT MAGIC ACADEMY by Jillian Tamaki reviewed by Jesse Allen
SUPERMUTANT MAGIC ACADEMY by Jillian Tamaki Drawn & Quarterly, 2015 reviewed by Jesse Allen Awkwardness is the hallmark of adolescence. Teenagers going off to boarding school or college find themselves entering a particularly unstable social realm for the first time. Having mutant superpowers or knowing the secrets of magic can help overcome this awkwardness—or it can exacerbate it. Part Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and part Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters, SuperMutant Magic Academy paints a whimsical, snarky, and heartwarming picture of this period of youth. The cover of SuperMutant Magic Academy features Marsha, bored and surrounded by the detritus of teenager-dom: her homework, notes, and of course a magic wand, no more special than the pencil she writes with. Characters walk through the halls of S.M.A. hypersensitive or oblivious to dolphin-headed Trixie, super-logical hunk Cheddar, cute and fox-eared Marsha, as well as the performance art antics of Frances or the annoying ploys for acceptance by laser-eyed Trevor. Like many an institutional bubble for gifted youth, S.M.A. is a parallel society where issues of identity, gender, sexual orientation, race, and how-is-everyone-going-to-live-in-the-real-world are played out in between magic classes, football games, regular classes, pranks, and protests. Contemporary youth are ... Read the full review
I REFUSE by Per Petterson reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
I REFUSE by Per Petterson translated by Don Bartlett Graywolf Press, 282 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The fact is that part of you is always fifteen, and will always be that silly, stunted age, when you had all the answers and your heart was folded as neatly as a napkin. The age when you sampled cigarettes and realized how easy it would be to run away from home, for good. The age when the drink or the drug worked, for the first time, altering the way you saw yourself and the rest of the messy, stimulating world. The fact is that everyone is this way, forever fifteen. We age in place, with our bodies getting older around the skeletons of our memories, which are fixed as the spears of a crystal. The same is true of Per Petterson, who circles the same heavy themes over and over again, as though hoping to divine their meaning. I Refuse, his latest novel, revisits familiar territory: cruel adults, absent parents, the unspoken pact between friends, and an eyeless God hanging over the whole scene like a painted canopy. Released over a month ago, I Refuse is already “selling like a train,” ... Read the full review
BORB by Jason Little reviewed by Jesse Allen
BORB by Jason Little Uncivilized Books, 96 pages reviewed by Jesse Allen Is Borb a graphic novel or comic strip? Packaged as both, the reader is treated to various juxtapositions that jar as well as entertain and enlighten. Illustrated in a style reminiscent of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, Borb’s main character is out of time. Homeless and alcoholic, he constantly stumbles into mishaps, finding resolutions that quickly fall apart and lead him into more desperate circumstances. But what we know and learn about him is very little, as alcoholism is the main character throughout this tale. He is able to make gains, such as finding food and a place to eat, and yet he sabotages himself through his addictive imbibing. As the story progresses, it is hard to muster pity for the main character. Rendered in classic Sunday comics’ style, the horrors of alcoholism are accompanied by the bumbling antics of the everyday life of this man. Rarely does he speak, and yet Little is able to capture the humor and sadness in his alcohol-fueled survival and fall. While never pretending to be a “feel good” read, Borb doesn’t come across as a cautionary tale either. Our man finds ... Read the full review
TROMPE L’OEIL by Nancy Reisman reviewed by Michelle Fost
TROMPE L’OEIL by Nancy Reisman Tin House Books, 352 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Does a good life play out like a well made film? Nancy Reisman has published two excellent books—a prize-winning collection of stories, House Fires (it won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction in 1999) and a novel, The First Desire. Now her second novel, just published by Tin House, Trompe L’Oeil, comes along and almost tricks the eye to thinking it is about a real family, or perhaps about what we can learn from a carefully curated assemblage of painters (descriptive response to their work is incorporated into the novel) including Edouard Vuillard, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and Georges de la Tour. Still, there is something more exciting at play in Trompe L’Oeil than the saga of the Murphy family or the discussion of visual art within the novel. This is a novel that finds beauty and resolution by testing how real life and literary art are like filmmaking. Reisman can sound like Virginia Woolf, but her experimentation also places her in the company of contemporary film directors like Terence Malick and Richard Linklater. If she has written a love letter to cinema, it’s not a ... Read the full review
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33 DAYS by Léon Werth reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
33 DAYS by Léon Werth, with an introduction by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [translated by Austin Denis Johnston] Melville House Publishing, 116 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin There are occasions when a phrase or a paragraph or a book hits the main line and after the dose everything is different. 33 Days arrived in the mail ten days ago, on a Friday. Guests were coming for the weekend. Already, the city was filling with people. The weather was warm, finally; pink and purple and white flowers garlanded the city. Fragrance smothered street corners. Whole neighborhoods were ripe for seduction. The book, slender and impeccably designed, put itself in my hands. I gazed at it quickly then put it down on the cushion in the old grocery store window where in winter we take turns stretching toward the sun. I picked it back up. I hadn’t heard of Léon Werth. But Saint-Exupéry—we forget Saint-Exupéry at our peril ... Read the full review
Ending Up
ENDING UP by Kingsley Amis NYRB Classics, 136 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Originally published in 1974, Kingsley Amis’ short novel Ending Up is about five old-timers approaching death in England. It is a startlingly funny work, considering the grim subject. I was initially apprehensive about this book, wary that my limited knowledge of English culture would hinder my ability to understand an English work of social satire, but happily this was not the case nor should it be a worry for any reader. Amis’ concerns in the book, while presented through British characters, are predominantly human in scope. The bulk of the novel, with the exception of a few doctors’ visits, takes place at Tuppeny-Happenny Cottage, where the novel’s five protagonists share residence. The cottage, with its off-the-beaten-path culture, is a petri dish of incubating irritation resulting from the character’s declining physical power and loss of mental faculties. While the plot is inherently tragic, Amis’ dry descriptions, annoying characters, and ridiculous ending argue for the book’s classification as comedy. Satirist Craig Brown, in the introduction, describes the book as irritation raised to the level of art. More succinct words have never been uttered. If there is an aim to ... Read the full review
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ASHES IN MY MOUTH, SAND IN MY SHOES  by Per Petterson reviewed by Rory McCluckie
ASHES IN MY MOUTH, SAND IN MY SHOES by Per Petterson translated by Don Bartlett Graywolf Press, 118 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is Per Petterson's first book but one of his last to be translated into English. This isn't surprising; Petterson's 2005 worldwide breakthrough, Out Stealing Horses, triggered a certain catching-up period for translators. Gradually, we readers have been able to consume the bulk of his output but it's only now that we can see for ourselves where it all started for the author. This means that readers are able to bring a context to this work that isn't usually part of the chronological reading of contemporary fiction. It makes for an interesting exercise. Published in 1987 when he was in his mid-thirties, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is a collection of stories that launched Petterson on a writing career that followed stints as a librarian, book store clerk, and translator. You could mine the man's biography for years, however, and still not find anything more horrifically arresting than the event that took place on April 7, 1990. Early that morning, while travelling aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, ... Read the full review
DISPLACEMENT by Lucy Knisley reviewed by Travis DuBose
DISPLACEMENT by Lucy Knisley Fantagraphics, 168 pages reviewed by Travis DuBose Lucy Knisley’s Displacement follows her previous graphic travelogues focused on carefree adventures in Europe with a diary about aging and constriction. In the winter of 2012 Knisley accompanied her elderly grandparents on a cruise through the Caribbean, a vacation that, given her grandparents’ condition—her grandmother was suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and her grandfather was mentally sharp but physically frail—was, by her own admission, ill-advised and possibly dangerous. As she recounts the difficulties of caring for her grandparents, Knisley ruminates on the role they’ve played in the life of her family. In particular, she quotes from and illustrates selections from her grandfather’s memoirs of the second world war ... Read the full review
THE SEA by Blai Bonet reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE SEA by Blai Bonet translated by and Maruxa Relano and Martha Tennent Dalkey Archive Press, 178 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Manuel Tur, sixteen years old and confined to tubercular sanatorium, stares out his window at the forested plane. He fixes his gaze on the holm oaks and the olive trees. This is Majorca, the Catalan island, 1942. “To the west,” he says, at the opening of Blai Bonet’s 1958 novel The Sea (El Mar), in the new English version published by Dalkey Archive Press, “the sky is hazy, blue, tender, like an open switchblade above the sea.” Bonet’s metaphoric language bristles with despair and danger. Tur, says another patient, Andreu Ramallo, “speaks as though bleeding to death.” The dying Justo Pastor has the “glassy, dirty gaze that animals have in the afternoon.” A razor blade in Tur’s hand (for the worst of reasons) has the look of a “train ticket that some invisible conductor has punched.” The sea itself is the novel’s heavy, so vast and inviolate it’s invisible. Tur, the novel’s protagonist, mentions it at the opening (threatened by the switchblade sky) and then at the end, when the reader comes to understand its power. Nowhere and ... Read the full review
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THE SCULPTOR by Scott McCloud reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore
THE SCULPTOR by Scott McCloud First Second Books, 488 pages reviewed by Amy Blakemore Scott McCloud is a mentor. Most first meet him in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, where he instantly disarms with his bespectacled, plaid glory, celebrating and clarifying the medium for readers. Witnessing McCloud usher original characters into the world with the same warmth and care in The Sculptor, his new graphic novel, is nothing short of a privilege. Rarely do we find characters presented in a manner I am compelled to call gentle: set down on the page as if being laid into bed, allowed to speak their dreamlike thoughts before sleep. And, like a dream, The Sculptor is equal parts muted and epic: you will notice it in your waking life—you will experience an eerie hum at the resemblance. McCloud introduces David Smith: a character written in the legacy of Doctor Faustus, here reincarnated in modern day New York as a struggling artist who agrees to shorten his time on earth for fantastic sculpting abilities. With a common name, David offers a relatable face for individuals dying for creative breakthrough, a cliché McCloud literalizes by instituting life and death stakes ... Read the full review
GUYS LIKE ME by Dominique Fabre reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
GUYS LIKE ME by Dominique Fabre translated by Howard Curtis New Vessel Press, 144 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Dominique Fabre has written a dozen novels, including the 2005 The Waitress Was New, which Archipelago Books brought out in English translation in 2008. New Vessel Press publisher Ross Ufberg attended a reading at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and decided to publish an English edition of Fabre’s next novel, Guys Like Me, in the translation by Howard Curtis. Both novels are narrated by middle-aged protagonists, once married, now single and lonely. “Sometimes you’re so alone you think you’re talking aloud even when you haven’t said a word,” says the unnamed narrator of Guys Like Me, who works in an unnamed office and lives in an apartment in Levallois. Once a week or so he talks to his son Benjamin, who’s finishing university studies, and every so often he meets up with his lifelong friend Marco to talk about Marco’s troubled son Antoine, who has been in and out of jail and rehab. Sometimes they reminisce and the landscape of the Hauts-de-Seine, which holds all their memories, talks back. He trolls Internet dating sites, “a kind of ocean” of loneliness. On ... Read the full review
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I FOLLOW IN THE DUST SHE RAISES by Linda Martin & PLASH AND LEVITATION by Adam Tavel reviewed by Johnny Payne
I FOLLOW IN THE DUST SHE RAISES by Linda Martin University of Alaska Press, 63 pages PLASH AND LEVITATION by Adam Tavel University of Alaska Press, 85 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne On finishing these two books of poetry recently published by the University of Alaska Press, I felt like a smug bigamist who can’t decide between two pretenders for his love, so chooses them both. I don’t regret this lack of choice, for each has its charms, and they can’t be reconciled. Linda Martin’s I Follow in the Dust She Raises is the kind of poetry that invites the word luminous, so impoverished by overuse it can no longer light the inside of a bulb, much less invoke noonday. Too many blurbs have been attached to a series of lesser books that make the mistake of working nature by subtraction—assuming that an endless wheat field with a tractor in it under an immense Nebraska sky—offer a limned absence that by itself could bring us to metaphysical tears. Borges came closer to the truth when he said, speaking of the pampas, that each object in them was separate and eternal. To simple but potent effect, Martin starts from zero and ... Read the full review
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BANNED FOR LIFE by Arlene Ang reviewed by Carlo Matos
BANNED FOR LIFE by Arlene Ang Misty Publications, 81 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Arlene Ang’s Banned for Life is obsessed with bodies, especially dead bodies. In fact, there is a reference to a corpse in nearly every poem in the first section and in many cases the corpses are literally present. And in the poems that do not have corpses, death is often not far or on hold. In “Mountains,” for example, the subject of the poem is referred to simply as “the body:” With both hands, the body touched itself where the physician lingered with the stethoscope . . . on that part where everything went wrong. The “body” of “Mountains” might be the mother figure of the next poem, “To Sweat,” who has cancer. In these poems Ang demonstrates how the ravaging power of a disease like cancer can trap us inside our own bodies or reduce our humanity to its component, material parts ... Read the full review
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TESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS by Vladimir Pištalo translated by Bogdan Rakic and John Jeffries reviewed by Rory McCluckie
TESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS by Vladimir Pištalo translated by Bogdan Rakić and John Jeffries Graywolf Press, 452 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie One of the most illuminating moments in Vladimir Pištalo's biographical novel, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks, comes not when the protagonist is immersed in the electrical discoveries for which he became famous, but when he is translating poetry. Searching for an English equivalent to the Serbian phrase crammed in, he pauses his contemplations to offer an observation: “On the outside, Serbian looks like such a tiny language,” he opines to his collaborator and friend, Robert Underwood Johnson; “but it's so roomy on the inside.” It's a short remark but one that is loaded with significance. Tesla himself was an outsider. A Serbian in North America, a loner in high society, and a genius among men, he was set apart from others his entire life. This outsider, however, possessed an intense inner existence molded by the death of a brother, and a capacious affection for the human race that informed his life's work. When he noted the duality inherent in the Serbian language, the inventor could just as well have been describing something fundamental about himself ... Read the full review
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SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW by Katherine Heiny Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost In Katherine Heiny’s very funny debut collection of stories, Single, Carefree, Mellow, women seek out a little more love, a little more sex, a little more passion. They have affairs with teachers, bosses, married men, and neighbors. Who can blame them? The comedy of their attachments made me think of the experiments of Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist who showed us how fuzzy little goslings, seeing a man instead of a mother goose after hatching, would naturally treat the man as their mother. These women and their men—as hilarious in their pairings as the goslings trailing behind a grown man, and they have no idea! Such innocents! Take Sasha in the opening story, “The Dive Bar,” of Heiny’s collection. She’s rattled by a phone call from the wife of her lover. The wife, Anne, whose name Sasha does not recognize, invites Sasha to meet for a drink. “And to paraphrase Dr. Seuss,” Heiny writes, “Sasha does not know quite what to say. Should she meet her for drinks? Now what should she do? Well, what would you do if your married lover’s wife asked you?” Sasha’s ... Read the full review
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THE 8TH HOUSE by Feng Sun Chen reviewed by Johnny Payne
THE 8TH HOUSE by Feng Sun Chen Black Ocean Press, 93 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne Aphorism is the thought slot of our time. Philosophy has turned cuneiform. The ambitious poem-cycles that might once have been written through urgent, incessant movement, seeking enjambment as a fugitive does a street corner, with muscular metaphors in hot pursuit, now favor the end-stop. Feng Sun Chen, in The 8th House, practices this art of the succinct. No organism is ashamed under the knife. A woman’s body is an angel factory. When I pick up a book and open it, it is dead. Even in Chen’s first person stanzas, we get a colder intellect, rendering emotional candor into sedate masochism. I like it when you look at me with disdain. I say things that make you want to hurt me. This is the real thing, severe as winter part icicle that cannot be smashed part that parts leaves nothing to fill, only futility fills. But although nothing free-floats, it’s hard to point to a firm scheme. The principle of recursive imagery, twining time and again around the broken spine, holds this book together more than any set of explicit ideas. Most of all, there ... Read the full review
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UNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong
UNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown Zone Books/MIT Press, 296 Pages reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong “SEN. KIRK: RE-ELECT RAHM OR CHICAGO COULD END UP LIKE DETROIT,” reads the Chicago Sun-Times headline. In the ensuing article, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk argues that the bond market supporting Chicago's debt would be a better fit with current mayor Rahm Emanuel leading the city, rather than challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Those of us who care about democracy wonder if democratic self-determination—whether defined minimally as self-rule, or, more robustly, as participating in popular sovereignty—is extinguished when one's vote is determined by the bond market and its assessments. This is the question U.C. Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown explores up in her latest book, Undoing the Demos. Moody's does not have a citizen's concern for public schools, parks, museums, local ecology, or Chicago's other common institutions. Yet these are the political conditions through which citizens find meaning in their lives. For those of us who care about democracy, the worry is whether the authority of finance capital on our political imagination relegates democratic citizenship to being simply the medium through which the investment market controls public life ... Read the full review
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THE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER by Shya Scanlon reviewed by Justin Goodman
THE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER by Shya Scanlon Dzanc Books, 413 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman “Spasms of the diaphragm,” the twentieth century theorist Walter Benjamin remarks, “generally offer better chances for thought than spasms of the soul.” And who hasn’t been convinced, softened to a position, by comedy? This is the principal of Shya Scanlon’s newest novel, The Guild of Saint Cooper, which returns to the self-conscious comedy, and literary meditation, of his first novel, Forecast. That Scanlon’s circled back after writing Border Run—geographically too, from Seattle to Arizona to Seattle—is unsurprising, since it was clear his ideas preferred spasms of the diaphragm. But a novel of so much laughter can betray itself; watching mildly funny Youtube videos with friends in an uproar is a similar feeling. It’s a dare not to laugh, a dare not to take the laughter sincerely, and thus create the irreparable distance. The Guild of Saint Cooper begins in waiting, and being “tired of waiting.” Blake Williams, narrator and, in Scanlon’s meta-structure, author of Forecast, has returned to his mother’s house to wait for their emergency radio to “roar to life and announce the collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf…trigger a tsunami…and Seattle would ... Read the full review
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THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD by Justin Hocking reviewed by Ana Schwartz
THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD by Justin Hocking Graywolf Press, 266 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz “Grand Programmes of Providence” Boys can be so mysterious, so closed off with their feelings. Surely they must feel things. But what are they feeling? And what are they thinking about those feelings? Why don’t they talk about those feelings? What do they expect women to do, simply divine those feelings like a barometer at sea—blind to the gathering clouds, deaf to the sound of the gulls and the waves, unable to smell the saltiness of the air? What is the deep wonderworld of a boy’s mind? What do boys want? Let’s get this out of the way: According to Justin Hocking, it’s not not sex. In his recent memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Hocking shows that boys also want emotional gratification that often, coincidentally, happens with sexual encounters. And he wants it pretty badly. He might even want it as badly as Ahab wants revenge on the white whale. Hocking’s desire—his addiction—certainly leads him to some strange and dicey situations, and, like Ahab’s quest, often has harmful effects on the people surrounding him. Hocking makes many analogies to characters and ... Read the full review
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OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS  by Claire Fuller reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS by Claire Fuller Tin House Books, 388 pages reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier Claire Fuller’s mesmerizing novel begins with a black-and-white photograph from 1976: the once-upon-a-time that her narrator, 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat, is trying nine years later to recall. The picture opens a window into a living room in Highgate, London, where a group of so-called “Retreaters,” among them Peggy’s father James, meet to discuss their defense against environmental and economic catastrophe. In the photo, eight-year-old Peggy’s image is blurred; she’s being led from the room by her disapproving mother Ute, while James clenches his fists and Oliver Hannington, his sinister-seeming friend, smiles “as though he wanted posterity to know he wasn’t really interested in the group’s plans for self-sufficiency and stockpiling.” But memory is partly projection; for Peggy, the photo is like a magic mirror, reflecting what she knows unconsciously but can’t yet claim. Her sudden, strange behavior after looking at it—using scissors to cut around her father’s face, then slicing off her bra and tucking his image beneath her breast—is the reader’s first clue that the “bloody Armageddon” she’s trying to recover is an entirely different disaster from the kind these survivalists predict ... Read the full review
THE SUGAR BOOK by Johannes Goransson reviewed by Johnny Payne
THE SUGAR BOOK by Johannes Goransson Tarpaulin Sky Press, 184 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne Antonin Artaud gave us the Theater of Cruelty. He “for whom delirium was/the only solution/to the strangulation/that life had prepared for him.” Now Johannes Garson, in the ironically named The Sugar Book, gives us a poetry of cruelty. It is the necessary car wreck that brings the Jaws of Life. The book is a whisky genre-bender in a haunted Los Angeles, where the “I” walks out on his son, fucks the homeless, reflects on scrotums, obsesses about tits, his hard-on, hot bitches, taxes, capitalism, the value of poetry (it’s worthless), noctuid larvae, and “the sepulchral chambers of the law.” Like many outrageous, seemingly misanthropic writers, he is at heart a moralist. The first section in fact contains a poem about immigration (as always, among many other topics). “The Law Against Foreigners Involves Mostly the Body” offers this withering insight: It’s also interested in my body when dogs bark at my genitals but it pretends that’s just evidence of a social conscience. It wants to find the human in me, even if it takes ripping this lamb mask into a thousand shreds and hanging it up ... Read the full review
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PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE by Atticus Lish reviewed by Jamie Fisher
PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE by Atticus Lish Tyrant, 417 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher If civilization ended tomorrow and had to be reconstructed based on Preparation for the Next Life, our descendants could get reasonably far with Atticus Lish's instruction manual. They could learn, for instance, how correctional officers respond to an incident in the yard. Or how to eat a hot dog: The guy whose house it was’s woman brought out a tray of hotdogs and set it on the coffee table, which was behind them. The plumber turned around and said thank you, hon. There's relish, she said. She sat down on the couch, which was behind the coffee table, and spooned relish on a hotdog and bit into it with her hand cupped under it and chewed. In Preparation for the Next Life, Lish fixates on certain details. Notice how insistent he is on the geography of the living room, seemingly at the expense of almost everything else besides the hot dog. No one says much in this well-appointed room and not much happens—here or anywhere. The nearest metaphor for the novel may be a heavily upholstered room in which no one talks, really, about anything ... Read the full review
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THE BOATMAKER by John Benditt reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
THE BOATMAKER by John Benditt Tin House Books, 451 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The intersection of poetry and prose is a rough sea, with deep, sometimes misleading currents. Some writers adapt poetry easily to fiction. Lyrical language works by adding texture to the plot; in some cases, it is the plot, as in flash fiction or more experimental forms. However, it doesn't compensate for shallow storytelling. John Benditt's novel The Boatmaker suffers from just this imbalance of plot and language, and the book founders from scene to scene, never quite finding its depth. This isn't a reflection of the author's abilities; Benditt has credentials out the wazoo, including a stint as editor-in-chief at Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation. He also was awarded the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize. The shift to fiction seems natural for such a talented writer, but the adaptation doesn't come easily and makes The Boatmaker a long, dull slog through all-too-predictable terrain. Alcoholic geniuses, bad guys, run-of-the-mill anti-Semites, women tormented by their emotions: it's all too familiar, and Benditt adds little new or surprising to these threadbare tropes. At its core The Boatmaker is an epic tale. The nameless main character awakens from ... Read the full review
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FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS by Luke B. Goebel reviewed by Jacob White
FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS by Luke B. Goebel FC2, 167 pages reviewed by Jacob White The pleasure of reading Luke Goebel’s little big first novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, comes less, it seems, from the pages themselves than from the palpable life-lust ripping past them, sloughing them off. The release of this energy is of course exactly a function of the novel form, yet the feat feels entirely new here, or newly realized. This monologue is running for its life, splitting the novel’s formal seams with intrusions to qualify retrospective distance or the shifting narrative present, the parentheses and brackets gaping wider and wider to reveal the fevered flesh beneath. In the narrator’s racing panic, we feel the pages tattering loose from his arms before finally snapping behind him with the wind into the crazy nothing. “Books are over,” the book concludes, and rarely indeed has a book been so humbled by the thing it contains. Life moves through these pages, and our joy—our elation—is seeing the pages struggle, and fail, to keep up. I suppose each of Fourteen Stories’ chapters revolves around a particular story or anecdote, but in each the particulars get ... Read the full review
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LEAVETAKING by Peter Weiss reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
LEAVETAKING by Peter Weiss translated by Christopher Levenson with an introduction by Sven Birkerts Melville House Publishing, 125 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The late years of adolescence are the torch on the sugar of the artist's will to create. Forgive the metaphor; I won't extend it. But as I was reading Peter Weiss' novella-slash-memoir Leavetaking, I couldn't help but think of my father, cracking into a crème brûlée with the backside of a spoon. I do not recall the restaurant, the rest of the meal, or the occasion, but I can remember clearly the strong, decided crack of the spoon against the caramelized crust and my father's white shirt cuffs and the satisfied look on his face as the dessert shattered, fragments piercing like shrapnel the smooth, sweet cream. My father has always done things with precision; I know him as someone who deliberates, and is a model of patience although he does not enjoy waiting. When he left home, it was time. We knew our exits just as we acknowledged the brief silence between courses, the arrival of a new dish on its small, white plate ... Read the full review
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TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST by Deirdre Madden reviewed by Annika Neklason
TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST by Deirdre Madden Europa Editions, 161 pages reviewed by Annika Neklason I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to meet my family for the first time. What it would be like to look at them as strangers, to know nothing more about them than what I could see in their faces and their clothing and the way they moved to introduce themselves. It seems like an impossible task, separating the people from the years I’ve spent growing up with them and the years I’ll spend growing old with them. Maybe more than anything else, family is a matter of shared time. Of photo albums full of baby pictures and accumulated Christmas and birthday presents and long, fidgety car trips to half-remembered vacation spots. Family is this weight of shared history, both experienced and inherited, and of shared futures that are always looming over every exchange of goodnights, or goodbyes ... Read the full review
WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND by Barbara Scheiber reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND by Barbara Scheiber Sowilo Press, 246 pages reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner With all the recent speculation about octogenarians releasing novels, it’s exhilarating, and reassuring, to read Barbara Scheiber’s sweeping first novel, published last year when the author was 92. We’ll Go to Coney Island, which was 30 years in the writing, tells a semi-autobiographical story about one family across generations, with a mother’s secret as the thread that connects everyone. The story is a set of relationships, conflicts, and memories as time passes. Scheiber was formerly a radio producer for NBC, and in 1975, she was involved in drafting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. The book’s cover is a Walker Evans photograph of the backs of a man and woman at Coney Island. Evans took the photograph, which captures the scene Scheiber describes on the page one, in 1928. The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured it as a signature poster for a retrospective of the photographer’s work in 2000. There is double-meaning to the photograph’s use as the cover illustration for We’ll Go to Coney Island: the man in the image is Scheiber’s father, Harry A. Gair, and the woman is Harriet, his ... Read the full review
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THE UNSPEAKABLE: AND OTHER SUBJECTS OF DISCUSSION by Meghan Daum reviewed by Jamie Fisher
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Authenticity is Her Bag So here's the problem with coma stories: not everyone gets a coma story. Life-threatening medical emergencies chased closely by miraculous recoveries are, for most of us, in short supply. People who do find themselves with a coma story shouldn't be surprised when friends, relatives, and neighbors want a piece of it. They want your Ninety Minutes in Heaven, absent the ignominious retraction. They want to know how your near-death experience has changed you, brought you closer to God. They want your spiritual lesson, and they will be insistent. Meghan Daum’s coma story caps off what you might call a tough year. First her grandmother died, then her mother. Then she began to feel woozy with grief or flu, except that it turned out to be flea-transmitted typhus that knocked her prone on a hospital bed, hovering for days in a medically induced coma. Her total recovery is so unanticipated that her neurologist is prompted to call it miraculous. (Not the word you want to hear from the man with his tools inside your skull, Daum observes.) ... Read the full review
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THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER by Alexander Pushkin reviewed by Derek M. Brown
THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER by Alexander Pushkin translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler NYRB, 170 pages reviewed by Derek M. Brown Originally published in 1836, The Captain’s Daughter is a fictionalized account of a historical rebellion against the administration of Catherine II. The novel first appeared in English as Marie: A Story of Russian Love. In this edition, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler defy the sentiments of Robert Frost, who once declared that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” In this edition, all the richness, humor, and poetry for which Pushkin is celebrated, is lovingly preserved. The Chandlers’ translation will undoubtedly carry mass appeal for a modern readership. Alexander Pushkin Alexander Pushkin In The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s protagonist, Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov, the son of a lieutenant colonel, is “enrolled as a sergeant in the Semyonov regiment while still in [his] mother’s womb,” that he may be placed in a regiment befitting someone of his class and rank upon the completion of his studies, which he undertakes while “on leave.” Expecting to serve in the Guards, which he equates with “freedom and the joys of life in Petersburg,” his temperamental father is determined to have him “serve in the real army,” ... Read the full review
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BOMBYONDER by Reb Livingston reviewed by Brent Terry
BOMBYONDER by Reb Livingston Bitter Cherry Books, 346 pages reviewed by Brent Terry Welcome to the crater. Keep your head down, your eyes open, and try not to lose your lunch…or your mind. Your guide on this journey is one of literature’s most unreliable narrators: a murderous, narcissistic, yet oddly appealing young woman on a quest through the bombed-out wreckage of her own psyche, in search of a past she can hang her hat on, a future that tells the truth, the real nature of her bomb-maker father’s legacy, and a little birdy that might make everything turn out okay. Reb Livingston’s literary forbears are legion. In this compellingly daft, lyrical, and mind-expanding novel we find traces of Sophocles, Lewis Carrol, Vonnegut, the Nabokov of Pale Fire, Hunter S. Thompson, Gertrude Stein, and Shelley—both of them—all run through the cerebral cortex of Tim Burton, put in a pill and swallowed whole by Livingston, the effect of which is an acid-trip of a novel that requires every bit of guile and courage a reader can muster. Livingston is best known as a poet, (with two critically acclaimed books and a Best American Poetry appearance to her credit) and her poetic sensibilities ... Read the full review
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THINK TANK by Julie Carr reviewed by Johnny Payne
THINK TANK by Julie Carr Solid Objects, 82 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne The first order of a book of poetry, irrespective of its particular style, is to give pleasure. It’s that simple. Whatever releases the dopamine from the nucleus accumbens qualifies. This was my experience with Julie Carr’s Think Tank. I suspended immediate comprehension, simply following the text’s pulses and impulses. Pick a through line: trail the images from start to finish, or the sounds, until understanding accumulates like dewdrops on a Maine slicker. This is a volume of extraordinary discipline, cerebral yet appealing, loose and playful: Yeast minutes leap to swamp the city’s borders or, Honk geese: soprano, duck duck hobbles, belly first a girl-falcon spins or, a headlock is to a hat as a tourniquet is to a condom a headlock is to a hat as a paring knife is to tongue I could go on giving examples ... Read the full review
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LEARNING CYRILLIC by David Albahari reviewed by Jon Busch
LEARNING CYRILLIC by David Albahari translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać Dalkey Archive, 189 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Printed on the cover of renowned Serbian author David Albahari’s most recent short fiction collection, Learning Cyrillic (his seventh book to be translated into English), is an excerpt from a review, “A Kafka for our times…” As I read the twenty plus stories in the collection, this short passage stuck with me. I was taken aback and distracted by how little resemblance to Kafka I found. Unlike Kafka, who never breaks role and keeps the fourth wall strong, Albahari entertains a great allowance of postmodern play—with frequent narrative breaks and ruminations on meaning and text. With the exception of, “The Basilica in Lyon,” about two-thirds into the collection, there is slight trace of Kafka. And even in this piece, the resemblance is superficial and lies solely in the use of a labyrinth setting ... Read the full review
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THE SCAPEGOAT by Sophia Nikolaidou reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE SCAPEGOAT by Sophia Nikolaidou translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich Melville House Publishing, 237 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin In Greece, the perennial crisis of confidence in political institutions has worsened since the economic crash of 2008, leaving young people particularly disenfranchised and disillusioned (“New Party Capitalizes on Greeks’ Loss of Faith in Their Leaders,” says the Times on January 21st). The writer Sophia Nikolaidou confronts the disillusionment in The Scapegoat, a neatly kaleidoscopic stirring of a novel, her first to be translated into English. Nikolaidou, in Karen Emmerich’s swift translation, connects the present anxiety to the1948 murder of the American journalist George Polk (the namesake of the prestigious Polk Awards), who had been investigating Greece’s corrupt right-wing government during the nation’s Civil War. Fearing the loss of U.S. aid, the Greek government pinned the murder on Grigoris Staktopoulos, a journalist and one-time communist. Evidence was thin to non-existent and, as in the Nisman case in Argentina, hardly anyone felt they would ever learn the truth ... Read the full review
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THE DOOR by Magda Szabó reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
THE DOOR by Magda Szabó translated by Len Rix introduction by Ali Smith New York Review Books, 262 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster Some types of love cannot be corralled, as narrator Magda finds in the legendary Hungarian novelist Magda Szabó's novel The Door, originally published in 1987 and now out in a new English translation by Len Rix. These other kinds of love are elemental—the way the Greek heroes were, in their mythological stature—and too terrible to share the flimsy mantel “love” with puppy-dog eyes and Valentine cards. The person in whom Magda discovers this other kind of love is Emerence Szeredas. Magda and her husband, both writers in a time when it was politically difficult to be an artist in Hungary, hire Emerence to keep house for them. Emerence is known as a hard worker, despite being in her 70s. She cares for many families in the neighborhood, not out of necessity, it seems, but from a sense of pride. “I don't wash just anyone's dirty linen,” she says. After checking Magda's references, she begins working for the couple, and her relationship with Magda begins to take shape ... Read the full review
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HOW YOU WERE BORN by Kate Cayley reviewed by Michelle Fost
HOW YOU WERE BORN by Kate Cayley Pedlar Press, 152 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost How You Were Born is an archive of anxiety. In the story “Young Hennerly,” Robert Browne gets out of being drafted to Vietnam by being a student of American folklore. His work involves interviewing older people from around the country and collecting their stories. He’s heard many times variations of the story Annie Reardon tells him. As a girl she was warned to stay away from the men in the trees, and especially the dangerous man who lives under a great rock. That man is so hungry, the story goes, that if he sees you he might eat you! Something about Annie Reardon’s telling spooks Robert Browne. When he drives past a huge rock and a man materializes out of nowhere at the side of his car and looking for a lift, it’s clear that our inner worlds hold fears that can’t be escaped as easily as the draft. There is plenty of danger and darkness in How You Were Born. The narrator of “Blind Poet” might be providing a blueprint for many of the stories when she says, “A stranger arrives, pounds on the ... Read the full review
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YOU'LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
YOU'LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor by Elizabeth Taylor selected by Margaret Drabble New York Review Books, 428 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster No, the other Elizabeth Taylor. The English one, who you've never heard of. The one who was a librarian and a governess, because that was still a thing in England in the 1930s, before marrying a businessman, which was also a thing and a perfectly acceptable in terms of occupations for men, prior to the invention of career terminology like “Lead Regional Response Liason” and “Customer Solutions Engineer.” It was a different world, in which you could be a writer and a housewife at the same time, and wear white gloves and talcum powder, and have a lover, and have two sets of riveted china, whatever that is. It is a world Taylor describes perfectly in her story “The Benefactress,” in which people “kept to themselves, drank their own tea in their own kitchens, used surnames, passed a few remarks, perhaps, when they met by chance in the graveyard or weeding their garden plots or, dressed in their best, waiting for the bus to go to the village and draw ... Read the full review
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AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY by Dot Devota reviewed by Julia Paganelli
AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY by Dot Devota Noemi Press, 80 pages Dot Devota, in her book, And the Girls Worried Terribly, puts aside marriage to man, woman, or God and marries self to self. Through bizarre and delightful celebration imagery, Devota leads us to conception through physical and mental violence. Devota’s title has been carefully selected from a caption in Oliver Statler’s The Black Ship Scroll. In this historical work, Statler writes of an instance when Japanese singing girls were to have their photographs taken by foreigners, “and the girls worried terribly,” that “the soul might leave to take up residence in the ‘new self.’” It is from the concept of these two selves that Devota’s book is threaded and spun. Even from the start, in frantic, dream-like sequences, the reader encounters creatures spawning from a vibrant and rapidly shifting earth—both of which are dependent upon the speaker. Bees, compared to champagne bubbles, become excited by mascara-laden eyelashes instead of blooming flowers. In this universe, bees are drawn to women instead of natural blooms— connecting nature to the self in alluring and magnifying ways. The speaker, in fact, finds her voice “amplified” by nature in her poem “iii ... Read the full review
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HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE by Clarissa Rile Hayward reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong
HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE: Stories, Institutions, Spaces by Clarissa Rile Hayward Cambridge University Press, 234 Pages In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward argues that the persistence of racialized spaces is not merely a matter of the remarkable, particular stories individuals tell themselves about themselves; rather, racism persists because of the way racialized commitments are embedded in the unremarkable narrative context, the physical objects and the mundane habits of thought and action, that serve as the unacknowledged backdrop of White community space. If Jill's identity emerges from stories told against a backdrop of political investment: strong public schools, smooth roads, well-paid teachers, etc., then Jill will have a hard time making sense of herself in a space characterized by political disinvestment. This second space will be felt as hostile in an existential way, even though the space may not be any more physically dangerous. Hayward argues against the “narrative identity thesis,” the notion that racial identities are matter of the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. She argues that, while this thesis can explain how Americans produce race through narrating racial hierarchies and racialized aspirations, the thesis cannot account for how racism is persistently reproduced, once the initial racist ... Read the full review
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EVERLASTING LANE by Andrew Lovett reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
EVERLASTING LANE by Andrew Lovett Melville House, 353 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster Why do we think that childhood is a golden, untouchable idyll? Childhood is horrible; even the happy, non-traumatic ones, stuffed with loving family, good food, summer vacations, and abundant laughter, weigh on us. As we pass through the gates of maturity, moving towards our adult selves, we forget the burden of being a child. Proust, with his Sisyphean sentences, knew. Roddy Doyle knew it, wrote it into his perfect novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. And Andrew Lovett knows it. His first novel, Everlasting Lane, captures the dreaminess of childhood, and the small details that make it nightmarish as well. I had a particularly fine childhood, in case you wondered. My parents were kind and affectionate. There were picnics. Ice cream. I liked school, and was allowed to read whatever I wanted. In the summers, my sister and I went to stay with our grandparents. On the weekends, we listened to bluegrass music in the park, hiked in the woods, and rode our bikes around the nearby lake. I do not say that childhood is horrible because mine was. I say it, because childhood is a ... Read the full review
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THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS by Marina Keegan reviewed by Colleen Davis
THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS by Marina Keegan Scribner, 240 pages reviewed by Colleen Davis There’s a stretch of Philly’s Walnut Street Bridge that makes me tap my brakes. I’m not a slow driver by nature, but that corner with the new streetlight always makes me reduce speed. About a year ago, a young man lost his life right there, when two cars collided. As one of the vehicles spun onto the sidewalk, Zachary Woods climbed the streetlight to avoid the car. Unfortunately the vehicle knocked both man and lamppost over the bridge. If the story isn’t sad enough, consider how talented Zachary was: he’d received dual admission to the MBA program at the Wharton School and a selective International Business program with the Lauder Institute. The guy was fluent in Chinese, skilled in international investment, and a record-breaking NCAA swimmer. No calculator is sophisticated enough to tally what the world lost during that crash. The memory of this incident haunted me as I read The Opposite of Loneliness, a collection of pieces written by Marina Keegan. Her title essay scored more than a million Internet hits shortly after its online publication. Marina, whose lovely smile adorns the book jacket, earned ... Read the full review
RED JUICE: POEMS 1998–2008 by Hoa Nguyen reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke
RED JUICE: POEMS 1998–2008 by Hoa Nguyen Wave Books, 245 pages reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke Hoa Nguyen is a poetic tease: her retrospective Red Juice is a decade’s-worth of poetry that tantalizes with glimpses of self-awareness and familiarity just as soon as the lines lose you in non sequitur and obscurity. The poet flutters between intense clarity and seeming nonsense (albeit eloquent nonsense), forcing the reader to dwell over her deceptively short poems, grappling with gut-reactions to the way the work appears on the page. Reading the book becomes an accomplishment, a brain teaser; steeping the simple language in one’s thoughts to draw out the meaning seems as much a part of Nguyen’s poetry as the words themselves. For all of its length, Red Juice is rewarding—its complexities reveal themselves in intricate patterns of meta-referentiality, historical weight, even humor. One has to wonder if Nguyen presaged the collection, time-stamped in its very title, as she wrote these poems seven-to-seventeen years ago: they drip with a sense of history, whether the recent past or the Neolithic. With titles like “Dream 5.22.97,” the reader can’t help but picture the Nguyen of the ’90s knowing that cataloging her poetic chronology would be useful ... Read the full review
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A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH by Kathryn Hellerstein reviewed by Alyssa Quint
A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH, 1586-1987 by Kathryn Hellerstein Stanford University Press, 496 pages reviewed by Alyssa Quint Poetry by female Yiddish writers has become the tree that falls in the empty forest of Jewish literature. As a discrete body of work it resonated only faintly with the same Yiddish critics and scholars who gushed over male Yiddish authors. English translations have become an important repository of the dying vernacular of East European Jews but, again, not so much for its female poets. Women's Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987. Hellerstein organizes her book around the concept of a literary tradition as invoked by the likes of T.S. Eliot in his monumental essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." To Eliot's eloquent if male-dominated and Eurocentic discussion of what "compels a man to write," (my italics), Hellerstein counters with a chain of women who work off the energy of the East European Jewish female experience with its idiosyncrasies of language, religion, gender, and culture ... Read the full review
THE DEEP ZOO by Rikki Ducornet reviewed by Kim Steele
THE DEEP ZOO by Rikki Ducornet Coffee House Press, 106 pages reviewed by Kim Steele Rikki Ducornet begins her newest book of essays, The Deep Zoo: To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and to reveal its potencies. Writing is reading and reading a way back to the initial impulse. Both are acts of revelation. And, just as a text is unknown until it is written, the deep zoo—the essential potencies at the core of humanity—exist unknown until explored. In this book of essays Ducornet boldly ventures into this essential human core ... Read the full review
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THE GHOST IN US WAS MULTIPLYING by Brent Armendinger reviewed by Johnny Payne
THE GHOST IN US WAS MULTIPLYING by Brent Armendinger Noemi Press, 94 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne It has been thirty years since Bernstein, Hejinian, McCaffery, et alii stormed the gates of poesy—twenty since some of them hitch-hiked up to Buffalo. Depending on where you sat, they were either a palliative or a wound—in either case, necessary. They ran over the daisy with a lawnmower, the better to see the fibers of its petals. In a preface some time back to a re-issue of The Sophist, Ron Silliman mourns that “seventeen years later . . .[it] doesn’t look as radical to the eye as perhaps it once did.” That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They accomplished what they set out to do and thus of course Bernstein’s work looks more familiar. There is a time to shoot down the rapids with funky alphabet soup spraying in your face, and another to issue out into a broader and slower expanse of river, where you can put your head up and see the sandstone cliffs. The essential debate of whether a word is a word or a picture will go on forever, without closure, as it should. Beyond anyone’s manifesto, how much ... Read the full review
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THE MATHEMATICIAN’S SHIVA by Stuart Rojstaczer reviewed by Michelle Fost
THE MATHEMATICIAN’S SHIVA by Stuart Rojstaczer Penguin Books, 366 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Stuart Rojstaczer’s debut novel The Mathematician’s Shiva follows a son mourning the death of his remarkably powerful mother. It’s a first person narrative, very chatty, in the voice of Sasha Karnokovitch, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences who studies the physics of hurricanes. Yes, his mother was something of a hurricane. Her death brings with it a kind of celebration of her genius, with a procession of mathematicians descending on the family to participate in the funeral and the seven days of shiva that the family observes afterwards ... Read the full review
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THE USE OF MAN by Aleksandar Tišma reviewed by Jamie Fisher
THE USE OF MAN by Aleksandar Tišma Trans. by Bernard Johnson New York Review of Books, 368 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher One of the major themes in The Use of Man is the use of women by men. Most of Tišma’s men are womanizers, none more confirmed than the central character Sredoje. As a boy, he dreams of lording over "sweet-smelling" slave girls as a pirate brigand; as an adult, he uses his policeman status to coerce frightened women into sleeping with him. The other main character, Vera, attempts to save herself as war approaches by separating from her family, escaping with a local official to Budapest. She attracts him by tanning in the sun, relying only on “her own healthy, supple body, in which she had full confidence.” In the long, dismal postwar economy, she will eventually prostitute herself in exchange for gifts and favors. For preoccupations like these, the author has been accused, on occasion, of “eroticizing the Holocaust.” ... Read the full review
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10:04 by Ben Lerner reviewed by Ana Schwartz
10:04 by Ben Lerner Faber and Faber, 245 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz 10:04 is Lerner’s impressive follow-up to 2011’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It aspires to make more meaningful connections between art and life; philosophy and experience. Atocha sets a high bar. That novel’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, wandered through Madrid in 2004, lonely as an El Greco cloud, thinking about Lukacs while staring at Bosch; in the meantime, cultivating a precious skepticism toward any “real experience of art.” 10:04 updates Atocha—tries to push conceptually further its concern for the melding of art and life, and the critical possibilities of the novel genre; while bringing them objectively closer, making them more reachable ... Read the full review
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WORKING STIFFS by George Dila reviewed by Jon Busch
WORKING STIFFS By George Dila One Wet Shoe Publishing, 42 pages reviewed by Jon Busch George Dila’s recently published short story chapbook Working Stiffs is a satirical romp through perverse worlds where power and profit constitute The Good. In such worlds, morality is thereby consigned a priori, as any action that serves power and profit. The stories contained in Working Stiffs are brutally honest, albeit zany, depictions of a universe existing under this moral teleology ... Read the full review
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Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines by Mark Lyons reviewed by Jon Busch
BRIEF EULOGIES AT ROADSIDE SHRINES by Mark Lyons Wild River Books, 216 pages reviewed by Jon Busch “...they just stick him in the ground with no stone, no nothin’. That ain’t right I say to myself.” This short passage from “He Sure Do Want to Fly”, one of the many superb pieces in Mark Lyons’ most recent short story collection, Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines, summarizes the intent of the work precisely. With the assurance and ease of a well-worn traveler, Mr. Lyons escorts the reader on a voyage through the lonely corners of North America, erecting descanos—roadside memorials—along the way. Each story, in its own manner, is an offering to the Gods of forgotten souls, or as the eponymous hero of the story, “Arnold’s Roadside Café” eloquently states, “The Great God of Roadkill.” The collection pulses with a tragic calmness akin to the writings of Carver or Cheever. Beneath every scene and absurd occurrence lurks a temperate sadness. While the explored themes of isolation, loneliness and death are heavy, the electric tone of the prose persistently enthralls. Here is Lyons’ energy and command of voice revealed by Blue-J, the protagonist of “He Sure Do Want to Fly,” describing a ... Read the full review
ORPHANS by Hadrien Laroche reviewed by Jamie Fisher
ORPHANS by Hadrien Laroche translated by Jan Steyn and Caite Dolan-Leach Dalkey Archive Press, 130 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Orphans starts with an advisory warning from the translators. Orphan, they explain, has a slightly different meaning in French: orphelin describes not only a child who has lost her parents, but a child who has lost only one parent. The explanation is necessary, but also somewhat inadequate. Looking back along our linguistic family tree, orphan shrinks and dilates to cover so much more. In Latin an orbus is “bereft”; in Old English ierfa, an “heir,” with close ties to “suffering” and “trouble”; in Old Church Slavonic, a rabu (think robot) is a “slave” or “servant.” When we work our way back to Proto-Indo-European, orbho means “bereft of father,” but also “deprived of free status.” Orphan begins to sound simultaneously like someone who has lost his parents and someone who is inescapably tied to them ... Read the full review
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IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE by Cynthia Atkins reviewed by Arya F. Jenkins
IN THE EVENT OF FULL DISCLOSURE by Cynthia Atkins CW Books, 95 pages reviewed by Arya F. Jenkins Questions about the past, memory and legacy interlink with everyday images that haunt the reader in Cynthia Atkins’s second volume of poetry, In the Event of Full Disclosure. Atkins’s poems arch into a tree extending way beyond herself, into family, society, and community, while inviting the reader to share in her concerns. If there is wholeness and power to be achieved, the poet seems to be saying, it is recognizing one’s humanness and interconnectedness ... Read the full review
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BLOWIN’ IT by Wintfred Huskey reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
BLOWIN’ IT by Wintfred Huskey The Head & The Hand Press, 355 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster Although the motif of the try-hard hipster wore thin over a decade ago, it’s still being trotted out in popular films, cartoons, articles, and so forth. The accusation of hipster-ness, which is distinct from being “hip,” at least where I live, is a serious one. Hipsters are characterized by a blissful ignorance that borders on denial. (Peter Pan was probably the original hipster.) A hipster appropriates the costumes of other characters and blends them, creating a deliberate pastiche of playful yet ironic cultural references ... Read the full review
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ON THE ABOLITION OF ALL POLITICAL PARTIES by Simone Weil, translated by Simon Leys reviewed by Ana Schwartz
ON THE ABOLITION OF ALL POLITICAL PARTIES by Simone Weil, translated by Simon Leys New York Reviews of Books, 71 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz When Albert Camus heard that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1957, he ran and hid. Averse to the frenzy of the press, he sought refuge in the home of a friend. He landed at the apartment of the family of Simone Weil in Paris’s 6th Arrondissement. Another friend, Czeslaw Milosz, in an essay on Weil, recalls that home fondly. He notes the humble, ink-stain-covered kitchen table, and he recalls the generous hospitality of Mme. Weil, mother of the young philosopher. He all but represents the quality of morning light illuminating the desk at which the young Weil would do her thinking. He never directly states that by 1957, Weil had been dead for almost fifteen years ... Read the full review
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TOTEMPOLE by Sanford Friedman reviewed by Derek M. Brown
TOTEMPOLE by Sanford Friedman NYRB, 419 pages reviewed by Derek M. Brown It is commonly held that the figure at the base of a totem pole is the least significant, but if we are to believe the young craftsman-cum-love interest of Sanford Freidman’s protagonist, Stephen Wolfe, this figure is the most vital, as it provides the final chapter to the structure’s story. Originally published in 1965, Totempole was revered and reviled for its unbridled depiction of a bourgeoning homosexual at a time when such themes were limited to the context of a cautionary tale. Unless the protagonist arrived at a much deserved tragic end, such works were thought to encourage morally untenable behaviors and corrupt the reading public. This work, however, provided a beacon of hope for those who thought themselves condemned ... Read the full review
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Bolaño: A BIOGRAPHY IN CONVERSATIONS by Mónica Maristain reviewed by Ana Schwartz
Bolaño: A BIOGRAPHY IN CONVERSATIONS by Mónica Maristain Melville House, 288 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz “Companionable Fictions” The first section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 describes a small but ardent group of academic literary critics who dedicate their lives to the work of an obscure German author, Benno von Archimboldi. Almost five hundred pages later, in the last section, “The Part About Archimboldi” Bolaño finally introduces the author. In between stretch many strange adventures, but most are not directly related to the work of the author. But neither, really, was the first part, “The Part About the Critics.” Instead, Bolaño narrates the friendships and rivalries of four dedicated readers. If not for the table of contents, the fictitious novelist would appear to be merely the occasion to build a story out of these otherwise unremarkable lives. Actually, for the characters, Archimboldi, who keeps evading their grasp, really does turn out to be an excuse for them all to sustain richer and more companionable lives ... Read the full review
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PANIC IN A SUITCASE by Yelena Akhtiorskaya reviewed by Michelle Fost
PANIC IN A SUITCASE by Yelena Akhtiorskaya Riverhead Books, 307 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Late in Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase, a character recalls a classic tale “about the lady who goes to see the rabbi and complains that life is so terrible with her slob of a husband and the crying children in a tiny apartment with such neighbors you start to think it might be better to be homeless, and the rabbi advises the lady to get a goat…” In the version I remember, the rabbi continues recommending that the lady bring another animal, and then another, one at a time, into her very crowded house, until finally, when the family is suitably miserable, he recommends getting rid of all the animals. Back to where they started—the original crowded condition—suddenly feels luxuriously spacious, and the family can’t thank the rabbi enough ... Read the full review
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THE WOMAN WHO BORROWED MEMORIES by Tove Jansson reviewed by Jamie Fisher
THE WOMAN WHO BORROWED MEMORIES by Tove Jansson Trans. Tomas Teal, Silvester Mazzarella NYRB Classics, 283 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Early on in a story in the new collection of Tove Jansson’s work, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a man named Stein takes over a celebrated newspaper strip. “Tell me something,” an older cartoonist asks him. “Are you one of those people who are prevented from doing Great Art because they draw comic strips?” “Not at all,” Stein assures him. “Good for you,” the man replies. “They’re insufferable. They're neither fish nor fowl and they can't stop talking about it.” ... Read the full review
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HOW WE CAME UPON THE COLONY by Ross White reviewed by J.G. McClure
HOW WE CAME UPON THE COLONY by Ross White Unicorn Press, 24 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure Ross White’s first chapbook, How We Came Upon the Colony, transports us to a strange world where the contemporary and the ancient commingle, and where nothing is ever quite what we first expect. Take “Downturn,” which opens: What’s gone remains gone. When the Library at Alexandria burned, scroll lit scroll. Whole languages died there. The Colossus at Rhodes, felled by earthquake, was eventually disassembled under the orders of the caliph, carted off by camel, and smelted like scrap.... ... Read the full review
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SISTER GOLDEN HAIR by Darcey Steinke reviewed by Devon McReynolds
SISTER GOLDEN HAIR by Darcey Steinke Tin House Books, 327 pages reviewed by Devon McReynolds The epigraph to Sister Golden Hair cites a line from the Modern Lovers’ 1970s era song, “Hospital”: “I'll seek out the things that must've been magic to your little girl mind.” But in this story, instead of “magic,” we get cloying bits of superficial whimsy. While author Darcey Steinke weaves an amusing series of tragic characters into the story, Sister Golden Hair is sabotaged by vapid details, jarring, nonsensical metaphor, and a patchy, dull narrative. Our narrator, 12-year-old Jesse, has moved with her family to a shoddy housing development in Roanoke, Virginia. Her father, a former preacher ex-communicated from the church for his far-out hippie leanings, has dragged his family up and down the Atlantic Seaboard in search of work. As he struggles to make sense of his morphing spirituality, Jesse struggles to make sense of her own morphing adolescence. She wobbles along the tightrope between girlhood and not-yet-a-womanhood: she languishes over her flat chest, dreads the arrival of her period, and is teased over her nerdy clothes –predictable dilemmas that have been told with more wit and insight from the likes of Judy Blume ... Read the full review
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MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: A MEMOIR by Brian Turner reviewed by Jamie Fisher
MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: A MEMOIR by Brian Turner W.W. Norton & Company, 240 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher Just a few years into the Iraq invasion, I remember a certain amount of critical hand-wringing over the absence of War Literature, or the absence of an audience willing to receive it. We had the relentless daily body counts, the Iraqi countryside reduced to numbers and the names of cities. We had news. What we were waiting for was a sense of perspective: writers who could walk into the news cycle and persuasively inhabit the numbers. Preferably we wanted soldier-poets, in the Wilfred Owen tradition, who could combine the insiders’ perspective and personalization with a capacity for irony. In a decade characterized by the deterioration of public institutions and increased privatization, we wanted, oddly enough, more privatization.  Ten years later, we have a crop of fine veteran-writers and a receptive market, from Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds, Phil Klay’s stories in Redeployment, and Brian Turner’s poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner, who has been praised as the poet of the Iraq/Afghanistan Generation soldier-writers, has now released his much-anticipated memoir of seven years spent fighting in the Army. Even in ... Read the full review
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ANOTHER MAN'S CITY by Choe In-Ho reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
ANOTHER MAN'S CITY by Choe In-Ho translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton Dalkey Archive (Library of Korean Literature), 190 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster As I'm writing this, the rain is beginning. The spattering sounds of drops hitting the fat, broad maple leaves on the tree outside my window catch my ear like static. The rain turns on the rich, dirt smell of the ground and dampens the sound of passing traffic. My neighbor, who plays the piano for the Portland Opera, is practicing some Brahms and singing out the notes as he plays them. This is my place. Do I think I belong here because my senses interpret it as “mine,” and I'm attached to the reality I identify as “mine,” or do I belong in any old place, whether I recognize my surroundings or not? This impossible question is the crux of Choe In-Ho's novel Another Man's City. I walked into it expecting something bizarre, futuristic, and possibly a bit whimsical. But this is not The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Instead, I ended up in one of Philip K. Dick's amphetamine dreams. “Every train station displays a timetable,” he writes, For the public, it's a kind of civic ... Read the full review
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THE WILDS by Julia Elliott reviewed by Kim Steele
THE WILDS by Julia Elliott Tin House Books, 372 pages reviewed by Kim Steele Finishing Julia’s Elliott’s debut short story collection The Wilds felt like leaving a strange town: I’m relieved to be back in a world where I understand the rules, but I can’t stop glancing in the rearview. The universe Elliott has created in this book is fenced together by her unique and consistent voice. Every story, whether it be about a lovelorn robot, a town overrun with feral dogs, or a young girl filling the two hours before her scheduled whipping, is written in the same unflinching and intelligent manner. Elliott doesn’t hold back from the repugnant details of life, in fact, many of her stories obsess over them. Again and again her characters are acne-smeared: “Purple pimples glistened like drops of jelly on his cheeks,” “A massive zit festers in my nose like a parasite; I’ve spent the morning picking at it with a needle.” Again and again they are diseased or disappointing in some way: “But the sun has not been kind to you. It has left you blistered and spotted and scathed,” “[A] twentysomething human male, pudgy, hairless save for the frizz under his ... Read the full review
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THE DEATH OF ARCHIE: A LIFE CELEBRATED by Paul Kupperberg et al reviewed by Natalie Pendergast
THE DEATH OF ARCHIE: A LIFE CELEBRATED Text by Paul Kupperberg; Illustrations by Pat Kennedy, Paul Kennedy and Fernando Ruiz Archie Comic Publications, Inc., 113 pages reviewed by Natalie Pendergast The Death of Archie: A Life Celebrated is the long-awaited two-part finale of the Life with Archie series, the most recent incarnation of which began in 2010. The series is a revival of the original Life with Archie comics that, along with spin-offs like Pals ‘n’ Gals and Betty and Veronica, began in the ’50s, spanned several decades, and consisted of hundreds of issues. Unlike the other variant series, however, the early Life With Archie comics were characterized by generic shifts from romantic comedy to drama and fantasy, as well as experimental alternate universes. Now, the latest Life With Archie comics have surpassed all others by dismantling the romance genre that promised a life of wedlock and nuclear family values, in favor of tragedy in the form of the untimely death of a hero. Victor Gorelick, The Death of Archie Editor-in-Chief, anticipates the obvious question on everybody’s mind, writing, in the forward to #36, “[s]o, why does Archie have to die?” Quickly, he answers, “[i]t’s not because Riverdale has changed, ... Read the full review
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CONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS by Joshua Isard reviewed by Jon Busch
CONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS by Joshua Isard Cinco Puntos Press, 249 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Joshua Isard’s Conquistador of the Useless is a novel of vertices, exploring the terrain of transitions, where cultural ethos and personal identity evolve in phase. It is this vague middle ground, the no-man’s-land between good ol’ days and dreary futures, where our protagonist Nathan Wavelsky traverses in apathetic strides. The use of this structure manifests in an insightful and poignant exploration of meaning and meaninglessness in contemporary life. What does it mean to live outside the narrative arc? The novel opens with Nathan and his wife Lisa moving out of the city of Philadelphia and into the suburbs. The move marks a return to the land of his childhood and the end of his rebellious twenties. But Nathan isn’t home in either world. He is neither young nor old, urban nor suburban. The era of his young adulthood has concluded and the shifting cultural tide presents him with the uncomfortable truth that all of his once grandiose, youthful angst has accomplished nothing—the experiences which once felt unique and infused with importance were, in fact, no more than the standard benchmarks of growth that all ... Read the full review
Augustus by John Williams reviewed by Ana Schwartz
AUGUSTUS by John Williams NYRB Books, 305 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz “Notable Romans” Those who studied Latin in high school or college might recognize the feeling with which Georg Lukacs introduces his Theory of the Novel. Although the book was published a century ago, it still holds valuable insight into the pleasures of reading. In the introductory sentences he describes those happy ages when the world and self were each visible with sharp distinction. Discrete they were, but also intimately familiar to each other. Lukacs’ framework is present in the first lists of Latin vocabulary; these collections of words alert contemporary readers to a world in which a word meant itself and at the same time more than itself. For example, ferro—iron—could denote the reliable metal; it could metonymically represent a sword made out of iron; and it could metaphorically represent any object of potentially harmful strength. These vocabulary lists imply a world in which such figures were useful, a world in which they could and would be deployed with practiced subtlety, perhaps in response to iron-willed violence ... Read the full review
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DUPLEX by Kathryn Davis reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
DUPLEX by Kathryn Davis Graywolf Press, 195 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster “It is not wise to break the rules until you know how to observe them,” said T.S. Eliot. Author Kathryn Davis has taken the aphorism to heart.In her latest novel, Duplex, a series of simple stories fit neatly into one another: she’s following the rules. Boy meets girl, boy sells his soul for fame. A woman takes a lover. A woman goes on a journey. And then she breaks them: using a pared-down voice and a lush palette of nightmarish images, she leads the reader through a futuristic suburb populated by robots, sorcerers, traveling photographers, and all kinds of ordinary-seeming people. It’s a pleasure to watch her break each rule, twisting the familiar fables and tropes into something shining and snarled, like a coil of steel wire left out as a trap for rabbits. The components of the plot are in fact mercifully simple, as anything more elaborate would sink the novel. As it is, the story centers around two star-crossed children, Mary and Eddie, and their neighbors, Miss Vicks the schoolteacher, and a sorcerer with white and wandering fingers. A family of robots lives next door ... Read the full review
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JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT by Antal Szerb reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT by Antal Szerb translated by Len Rix New York Review Books, 296 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin I don’t mind observing that as a child I reveled in erotic games, secret afternoons and evenings of play at sex and death. The child’s world stretches infinitely and yet is all encompassing. The ceaseless hours end—usually forcibly, by parents—inevitably leaving a taste of unfulfilled desire. Oh, to be so fully awake, so charged again. Those earliest encounters with desire—yet unnamed, unformed—set on us, mark us, until, at some point the feelings fade. Not desire itself, but the skin’s memory of it fresh, smothered by age and responsibilities. But for some of us, perhaps because the experience is so acute, the process of forming relationships to others cements in those early rooms. Then adulthood presses, like a train conductor telling you, in a foreign language you don’t understand, that you’re sitting in the wrong class. You shrug, he keeps demanding, and the seconds freeze in confusion until at last someone pushes you along. It is in this state that we find Mihály, the 30-something protagonist of Antal Szerb’s scintillating 1937 novel Journey By Moonlight, published this week—in the English translation by ... Read the full review
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THING MUSIC by Anthony McCann reviewed by Matthew Girolami
THING MUSIC by Anthony McCann Wave Books, 113 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami Anthony McCann’s newest collection, Thing Music, is not unlike a player piano, only instead of standards it plays John Cage or even Merzbow. That is to say, that while the reader recognizes McCann’s Thing Music to be poetry as one recognizes Cage’s compositions to be music, the common associations with either art—melody and harmony, form and line—are rearranged, actively dissonant, and yet nonetheless beautiful. Unlike familiar emotional confirmations found in melodrama or more confessional lyric poetry, Thing Music’s reward is one of discovery: of new pleasures found in innovative poetic forms, and of newfound emotional connections made with the imagery and diction belonging to those forms. That is not to say Thing Music overtly plays with common poetic restraints; rather, the collection challenges the idea of form through its overall free-form stylistic execution, only leaving recurring motifs of formal structures, words, and images throughout the collection as trail blazes to unify the poems and enhance the reader’s comprehension of the collection as a whole text. But what is a “text”? It seems McCann explores the text’s limits as an object, that is, as a set of signs ... Read the full review
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I CALLED HIM NECKTIE by Milena Michiko Flašar reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
I CALLED HIM NECKTIE by Milena Michiko Flašar translated by Sheila Dickie New Vessel Press reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin A novel can fly across time and space or it can burrow, it can seek out, hide from itself, emerge somewhere else, on some other plane: a surprise. Certainly, other novels set in Tokyo, as is I Called Him Necktie, sprawl across the endless city as words scratch across the page. But this one, by the 34-year-old Milena Michiko Flašar, the Viennese novelist whose mother is Japanese, is a kind of airless tunnel—the closer you are to the exit the further you’ve actually gone, lost as if in meditation, digging. Flašar’s protagonist is Taguchi Hiro, 20 years old and a hikikomori—an outcast who shuts himself in. Buried in silence, Hiro hasn’t left his room in two years. “My room was like a cave,” he says, a few days after venturing away, into public for the first time. I had grown up here. I had essentially lost my innocence here. I mean, growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling ... Read the full review
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The Search for Heinrich Schlögel
THE SEARCH FOR HEINRICH SCHLÖGEL by Martha Baillie Tin House Books, 352 pages reviewed by Jamie Fisher "ERRATICA" Think fast! ____’s fourth novel navigates the tension between fact and fiction, readership and voyeurism, the impersonality of the archive, and the personal voice of the archivist. If you guessed W.G. Sebald, you’re not far off. He was known for writing in luminous ellipses around historical catastrophe, particularly the Holocaust, with an intellectual restlessness mirrored by his travels. But the author in question is Martha Baillie, and the book not Rings of Saturn but The Search for Heinrich Schlögel. Baillie likes to lay her influences plain; she has named Sebald as one of the patron gods of “elegance and lucidity” guiding her previous novels. In The Shape I Gave You, a novel studded thickly with “archival” photographs, she obsessed over authenticity and travel. Her Incident Report was narrated entirely through (admittedly unorthodox) workplace documentation. Sebald’s Rings and Baillie’s Search even begin with similar whodathunkit reference-book citations, Sebald’s describing the eponymous rings of Saturn and Baillie’s digging up an obscure usage for erratic: a rock “transported from its place of origin, esp. by glacial action.” Here our erratic is Heinrich Schlögel—a restless walker ... Read the full review
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HARLEQUIN’S MILLIONS by Bohumil Hrabal and WHO IS MARTHA?  by Marjana Gaponenko reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch
HARLEQUIN’S MILLIONS by Bohumil Hrabal translated by Stacey Knecht Archipelago Books, 312 pages  WHO IS MARTHA? by Marjana Gaponenko translated by Arabella Spencer New Vessel Press, 216 pages reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch We had grown old, yet we were still the same as we’d been when the war ended, I had moved even further back, to the last century, which had risen for me from the dead. This retirement home with its Baroque halls and garden, this castle in which I lived, suddenly meant more to me than that golden brewery of mine, where I had spent my younger years. Here in this castle I lived every day in the mystery, in the strata of human destinies of people who had long since been buried… —Bohumil Hrabal, Harlequin’s Millions Levadski did not have much time left to forget. According to the diagnosis he should have felt dreadful…From the breast pocket of his pajamas, however, his heart announced an overwhelming joy at beautiful things, pleasure and desire, to see beauty like the light of God’s face. Beauty in spite of the revolting decay of the institution of his body, beauty in spite of ugliness and precisely because of it. Beauty ... Read the full review
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TWO FAINT LINES IN THE VIOLET by Lissa Kiernan reviewed by Carlo Matos
TWO FAINT LINES IN THE VIOLET by Lissa Kiernan Negative Capability Press, 112 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Lissa Kiernan’s debut collection radiates, burns, and fluoresces like uranium glass, like a “bed of plutonium nightlights.” Many of the poems, especially in the first half of the book, focus on her father (“My father, my leather fetish, my motorcycle papa”) and deal largely with the grief she experiences as he dies from cancer. But these more intimate revelations are not allowed to remain solely in the realm of the personal, set off as they are by poems of a more political, or rather politically charged nature. These poems—some of which are found poems based on official documents and newspaper reports—indict the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station for contaminating the town where her father lived in Massachusetts. The intrusion of the faceless other on the integrity of the human body—and the power plant is not the only example of this—gives these poems their unique and disturbing power. For example, in “The River, My Father,” the very first poem in the book, Kiernan appears to have written a prose poem, but although it is a solid block of text, it is made up almost ... Read the full review
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Our-Lady-of-the-Nile
OUR LADY OF THE NILE by Scholastique Mukasonga Archipelago Books, 244 pages translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin This is how Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile ends, in 1979: You remember what they used to tell us in catechism: God roams the world, all day long, but every evening He returns home to Rwanda. Well, while God was traveling, Death took his place, and when He returned, She slammed the door in his face. Death established her reign over Rwanda. She has a plan: she’s determined to see it through to the end. She does, in fact. In 1994, ethnic hatred erupted into political terror and Hutu militants wiped out some 800,000 Tutsi people along their Hutu allies. This is the part of the history of Rwanda, a tiny East African nation squeezed between Burundi and Uganda, between colonialism and corruption, that we remember. For most of us the genocide was unfathomable and worse, a distant horror, another strange interruption of the Clinton years. Here, in this slender, deceptively fast-paced novel, Mukasonga, who fled Rwanda before genocide, explores everything leading up to it: ethnic rivalry, resentment, hatred, the quota system that limited Tutsi ... Read the full review
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NOTHING IN BETWEEN by Marybeth Rua-Larsen reviewed by Shinelle Espaillat
NOTHING IN BETWEEN by Marybeth Rua-Larsen Barefoot Muse Press, 58 Pages reviewed by Shinelle Espaillat Fairy tales often have at least two versions: the Disney translations, in which everyone signs and good guys have perfect teeth, and the Grimm incarnations, which feature visceral heart extractions and frequent attempted murder of young girls. We often study fairy tales to examine what messages they convey about gender and voice; in her collection, Nothing In-Between, Marybeth Rua-Larsen offers alternative interpretations, both of the tales themselves and our reasons for telling them. The theme of rescuing runs throughout most fairy tales, making it an apt opening for the collection. The poem “The Rescue” offers a change in perspective on the theme as seen in “Rapunzel.” In this poem, we don’t see the princess as just waiting around to be rescued; rather, she is making a conscious, informed choice. She could cut her hair and end her torment. She could die and end the witch’s power. She chooses instead to live, and to love her hair as a lifeline, a tether to a potentially better future. In this light, Rapunzel becomes a feminist, examining the situation and deciding for herself which path is the right ... Read the full review
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Celebrated Summer
CELEBRATED SUMMER by Charles Forsman Fantagraphics Books, 67 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott For the first potion of one’s life, summer is a welcome three-month respite from the seemingly stressful remainder of the year. Like the buds of a flower, it is a period of joy in the face of few commitments and responsibilities. But somewhere, as those flowers begin to fade and adolescence sets in, we become forlornly reminiscent of those times as we’re caught in-between one concrete stage of life and another. Charles Forsman’s Celebrated Summer tells of one such swan song, recalling the alternating experiences of two teens as they trip both literally and figuratively in the midst of one teenage summer. Told through the perspective of Wolf, whose gentle nature is masked by his large frame and sprout-like mohawk, we join a transient trip from the suburbs to the shore. Wolf’s partner in crime, Mike, is a sassy-mouthed whisp of a teenage boy who initiates both trips, leading Wolf down the rabbit hole with two tabs of LSD and on an unnecessarily elongated drive. Mike is clearly the alpha-male in this friendship, though Wolf—who describes himself as “a pretty nervous guy on the inside”—does not seem ... Read the full review
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PRAYER OF CONFESSION by Jen Karetnick reviewed by Amanda Hickok
PRAYER OF CONFESSION by Jen Karetnick Finishing Line Press, 28 pages reviewed by Amanda Hickok Jen Karetnick’s Prayer of Confession pulls the reader into an intimate, enclosed space—often either a private, domestic space or a suspended moment—that is alternately comforting and suffocating, at times a place of productivity and rebirth and at times a stifling, labyrinthine funhouse that consumes and destroys. In these spaces, identity is either recovered or lost—fragments of the self add up to a whole that is seemingly cohesive and meaningful, or become increasingly disjointed. Karetnick’s images of these spaces—homes, motels, coffins, temples, and the body—as well as the barriers to the exterior world—veils, glass, windows, apertures—recur throughout her poetry. An additional recurring element that serves to further complicate the issue of identity is the reflected image of the subject—caught in a window, mirror, photograph, or the eye of another—that is simultaneously intriguing and repulsive, humanizing and objectifying, unifying and shattering as the image is collected, distorted, or doubled in these prismatic interior spaces. What Karentick captures in her poetry is the anxiety and uncertainty produced by the uncanny, by the subtle gap that emerges between the familiar and unfamiliar. One such uncanny space is that of ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber Dalkey Archive Press, 656 pages reviewed by Gabriel Chazan When looking at the paintings of Balthus, the viewer can’t help but react. Seeing paintings of young and often pre-pubescent girls and women in poses loaded with a strange sexuality, there is no possibility of cool remove. The viewer is made to consider actively their role in looking at the young women in these sometimes cruel, always compelling, provocative and often beautiful images. Balthus’s images have a strange, almost dreamlike hold, as they look back at us, impenetrable and confrontational. Balthus himself is somewhere in them yet distant. He wished his life to be separate from his work, something to be never included in exhibits or official publications, only “a misleading and harmful screen placed between the viewer and painter…paintings do not describe or reveal a painter.” He almost entirely obscured the true facts of his life, recreating himself as a count and rendering himself a challengingly elusive subject for biography. He placed the most responsibility on those looking at his work to react to whatever sexuality or darkness they might find in the work as their own perception ... Read the full review
ALL OF YOU ON THE GOOD EARTH
ALL OF YOU ON THE GOOD EARTH by Ernest Hilbert Red Hen Press, 96 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure In her classic “Some Notes on Organic Form,” Denise Levertov argues that “Rhyme, chime, echo, reiteration…not only serve to knit the elements of an experience but often are the very means, the sole means, by which the density of texture and the returning or circling of perception can be transmuted into language, ap­perceived.” When a formal poem is doing its job well, it couldn’t exist in any other way. In All of You on the Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert takes on the sonnet form with every poem. At their best, Hilbert’s poems use that form to full advantage, revealing depths of meaning that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Take a poem like “Drift,” which describes of timelessness and isolation, a purgatory. The poem begins in suspension: The sky is warm and heavy before rain. You throw down anchors. They till lines in soft Clay, blooming muddy clouds. You sometimes slow, Sometimes speed, as you pass forest and plain. We are caught in the moment of waiting. The sky doesn’t clear, the rain doesn’t come. The anchors produce mud—not quite water, not quite ... Read the full review
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This One Summer
THIS ONE SUMMER text by Mariko Tamaki illustrations by Jillian Tamaki First Second Books, 320 pages, reviewed by Natalie Pendergast Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s 2014 graphic novel This One Summer follows the lives of two summer cottage friends in their early teens. Rose and Windy spend this last summer of innocence testing the proverbial waters of adolescence as well as the actual waters of the Awago Beach where their families summer. The girls have heard things over the years, things about miscarriages and abortions, but this one summer, they experience the emotions of women and girls who are actually entangled in such adult problems. What Rose and Windy thought were simply mistakes to be avoided become a complicated mix of desire, pain and decision-making. Jillian Tamaki’s navy-violet-grey art expresses movement by way of diversified frame angles covering a single scene and comfortably suturing earlier panels with later ones. Often de-centering the frame’s focus from a character’s face to the side nape of her neck or a close-up of a portion of her hand, Tamaki calls upon us to see through the panels as one would a small hole in a fence. This act of peeping further connects us to the girls ... Read the full review
BILATERAL ASYMMETRY by Don Riggs reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat
BILATERAL ASYMMETRY by Don Riggs Texture Press, 120 pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat In his new collection, Bilateral Asymmetry, Don Riggs explores the balance—or the imbalance—between art and life, and the inevitable synergy between the two. His illustrations illuminate his poetic concepts, offering the reader a fuller texture through which to experience his work. In the manner of the old masters, Riggs offers provocation with deceptive simplicity. The first section, Gallery Opening, is an exercise in ekphrasis. Riggs entwines visual and literary art, reminding us how genres and mediums can and should inspire each other. Indeed, the opening poem, “Still Life,” creates a robust picture in the style of Vermeer, of the tortured artist struggling with the space between inspiration and craft. “Pagan Mystery in the Renaissance” further exposes the shifting boundaries between words and worlds, exploring Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses and how misinterpretation led to a masterpiece that inspires fantasy. Readers needn’t be familiar with the works in question in order to see them in Riggs’ imagery, and to understand the works’ impact on both the writer and the world, though the poems make you want to physically experience the artistic works ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
My Struggle Book Three
MY STRUGGLE: BOOK THREE: BOYHOOD by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Dan Bartlett Steerforth Press, 432 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow If all one reads is Proust, it might be easy to forget that some young boys—a lot of young boys—are really fascinated with the body and its messy, abject creations: excrement, urine, semen, saliva. What a relief to see that Karl Ove Knausgaard is, at least in this respect, less Proustian than the great hubbub would have it. You have probably have heard of his six-volume memoir-novel, My Struggle. Most famously, Zadie Smith, in a tweet, called it her “crack.” The third volume, Boyhood, translated by Dan Bartlett and published in London earlier this year, has, thanks to Steerforth Press, finally arrived here in the states. This installment takes readers back to the childhood of the narrator-protagonist, roughly from when he is eight to twelve years old. The plot, such as there is one, is picaresque: young Karl Ove’s adventures with his friends. It describes his early intuitions of history, and his discovery that his parents were real people. There’s an early scene that very quickly establishes Knausgaard’s seemingly effortless ... Read the full review
TALKATIVENESS by Michael Earl Craig reviewed by Anthony Blake
TALKATIVENESS by Michael Earl Craig Wave Books, 104 pages reviewed by Anthony Blake In a recent column of The New York Times, leading poets were once again asked whether their genre could ever regain its relevancy. William Logan’s contribution “As for relevance, poetry does not need to be relevant. It needs to be good” and David Biespiel’s assertion “Does poetry matter? Yes. Can poetry be more relevant? No.” paint poetry as a rogue agent that doesn’t need the approval of its peers. For a bleaker view of things, throw in David Orr’s depiction of poetry as “the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19th-century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious and possibly futile effort at persuasion.” A comprehensive picture unfolds. For better or worse, poetry isn’t relevant today and cannot, or cannot easily, become so again. And yet, either unaware of this assessment or, more likely, in spite of it, Michael Earl Craig (Thin Kimono) opens his fourth poetry collection, Talkativeness, with this Yamamoto Tsunetomo quotation: “No matter how good what you are saying might be, it will dampen the conversation if it is irrelevant.” With Talkativeness, Craig ... Read the full review
Poetry, poetry reviews /
BIRDS ON THE KISWAR TREE by Odi Gonzalez translated by Lynn Levin reviewed by J.G. McClure
BIRDS ON THE KISWAR TREE by Odi Gonzalez, trans. Lynn Levin 2Leaf Press, 140 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure It’s the Last Supper. The apostles pray earnestly as Christ radiates a heavenly light, bread-loaf in hand. It’s a scene we know well, with a key difference: dead-center of the canvas, surrounded by corn and chilies, a roasted guinea pig splays its feet in the air. This is a prime example of the Cusco School of painting, an artistic movement that developed during Peru’s colonial period and that forms the subject of Birds on the Kiswar Tree. As translator Lynn Levin explains in her notes: Painting flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Peru when Spain sent highly-accomplished painters, some of them painter-priests, to the Andes in order to evangelize the people through art and art instruction. The Church, however, put severe restrictions on the native artists: they were permitted to paint only religious subjects. The artists responded by producing work that was pious, syncretistic, and subversive. In hidden nooks in churches, Quechua artists painted angels with harquebuses; they furnished the Garden of Eden with Andean birds, trees, and flowers… ... Read the full review
DARK. SWEET.: NEW & SELECTED POEMS by Linda Hogan reviewed by Amanda Hickok
DARK. SWEET.: NEW & SELECTED POEMS by Linda Hogan Coffee House Press, 421 pages reviewed by Amanda Hickok Opening Linda Hogan’s Dark. Sweet. is like coming upon the entrance to a dark cave and striking a match to find the interior covered in Paleolithic paintings. Her imagery is primordial—simple, direct representations of the natural world that recur throughout her poetry to tell and retell the history and oral stories of the Chickasaw, her own personal history, and her concerns for the present. The same images are reused and recast with each poem, accumulating new layers of meaning as her writing progresses from the late ’70s to the present day. The reader is steeped in her distinct personal symbology—a poetic world bursting with animal and plant life, ubiquitous water and sky, fragmented bodies, houses, and cities, and glimpses of tribal communities against the antithetical contemporary American society. Also like entering a Paleolithic cave, reading Hogan’s poetry is like uncovering a record of a lost world—a world that exists in the memory of the poet, in her personal and cultural history, but also in the cultural history of America and the dark recesses of our collective unconscious. It is a faded and fragmented ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
TITULADA by Elena Minor reviewed by Anna Strong
TITULADA by Elena Minor Noemi Press, 75 pages reviewed by Anna Strong From its first pages, Elena Minor’s TITULADA announces its commitment to experimentation and resistance to easy characterization in a single poetic or linguistic category. English is invaded by Spanish, typical grammar and punctuation are dispossessed by mathematical symbols, poetry itself is invaded by prose and even drama. Readers enter these poems with trepidation, uncertain of where the floor will fall out from underneath them, but that not knowing, the discomfort with which we read these poems is a crucial part of the immense pleasure of reading them. Minor’s dedication is “For all those upon whose shoulders I stand” and these poems certainly owe much, visually and typographically speaking, to e.e. cummings. But where cummings mainly broke up words and messed with punctuation for visual effect, Minor’s additions, subtractions, and radical indentations suggest what is linguistically possible with even infinitesimal changes. In “Low and Slow to Taste,” the first prose poem in the collection, Minor uses brackets to suggest alternate readings and other possibilities: These elements are essences such as have no mor[t]ality. They [they] neither have color nor tenor nor faith so they [they] can’t conceive of the ... Read the full review
THE FORGOTTEN MAN: A New History of the Great Depression Graphic Edition by Amity Shlaes reviewed by Jesse Allen
THE FORGOTTEN MAN: A New History of the Great Depression Graphic Edition text by Amity Shlaes illustrations by Paul Rivoche 320 pages, Harper Perennial reviewed by Jesse Allen The new graphic novel edition of Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, illustrated by Paul Rivoche, is a thorough historical account of America during the Great Depression years. From the starkly illustrated cover of the masses—grim faced men with shadows for eyes, in a sea of Stetson wearing unfortunates—to the beautifully rendered illustrative black and white style on each page, this book is a visual treat. Spanning from 1927 to 1940, Shlaes is able to cover a wide swath of economic and cultural changes. While the crux of the book is “the Forgotten Man,”  the working class men and women who thrive or suffer depending on how the government is able to deal with the economy in light of recent disasters, this book is about historical change and how the U.S. ultimately gets out of the Depression. Rivoche’s panels are drawn with simple yet carefully detailed scenes. His characters either evoke this general period of history or are specifically recognizable for their significance in this era. Narrated by Wendell Lewis Willkie, The Forgotten Man begins with ... Read the full review
HOME LEAVE by Brittani Sonnenberg reviewed by Michelle Fost
HOME LEAVE by Brittani Sonnenberg Grand Central Publishing, 259 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Brittani Sonnenberg’s debut novel, Home Leave, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on loss, geographical place, expatriate experience, sibling rivalry, family, and growing up. Sonnenberg writes with clarity about the messiness of the expat Kriegstein family’s lives. To tell her story, Sonnenberg begins the opening section improbably from the point of view of the mother’s childhood home. Yes: we hear from a house. What I liked very much about the novel is that it continued in this way, rough and tumble in its narration, jumping from first person accounts in the voices of the family, third person voices, first person plural voices, and so on. Home Leave has the fitting feel of a kid landing somewhere without concern about fluency but a willingness to tell her story using the language that works. Sonnenberg captures beautifully what it’s like to grow up as an American abroad, not as a tourist but not fully as a native either. There’s bougainvillea, there’s spitting on the streets, there’s dancing in the public square. There’s always loss and longing—whether it’s for a simple box of Honey Bunches of Oats, the exhaust mixed ... Read the full review
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SELECTED POEMS by Mark Ford reviewed by Matthew Girolami
SELECTED POEMS by Mark Ford Coffee House Press, 146 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami Mark Ford’s Selected Poems is one loquacious houseguest. Appearing unexpectedly at your door one soaked evening, the speaker of these poems immediately pulls at the thread of your surprise as you prepare them some tea. Despite being visibly traveled the speaker is quite chipper, and as the details of their arrival unfold your home crowds with characters from British literature, mythic Roman gods, but also heirlooms—such is the cultural capital of this collection: both of the world and of the self. While this chronological sampling of Ford’s previous three collections spans twenty-two years, along with new poems, the writing is consistently and uniquely Ford throughout. That is not a remark on growth, but rather Ford’s authority: here is a poet who confidently knows his craft. While there is a twinge of John Ashbery in Ford’s writing—one Ford would not deny, as he is an Ashbery scholar himself—Ford nods to his influence but distinguishes himself in his own right. And this distinction: Ford’s uncanny blend of encyclopedic knowledge and a commitment to the mundane—or rather, a surreal spin on the mundane. Take this passage from “Affirmative Action,” ... Read the full review
poetry reviews, reviews /
CONVERSATIONS by César Aira reviewed by Ana Schwartz
CONVERSATIONS by César Aira translated by Katherine Silver New Directions, 88 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz The Little Estancias Domestic Tourism What’s the name for the genre of writing about a house? House tourism exists, but what about house-writing? It would be a good word to have on hand when reading Argentina: The Great Estancias, because whatever that genre is, this book is the exemplar. An estancia is a large estate originating in colonial settlement of Latin America and supported by agricultural industry, usually livestock. Despite regional variation across Latin America (and the use of different names, like hacienda), they generally consist of a large central house and several smaller edifices across acres upon thousands of acres of land. True to the title, the nation of Argentina is the primary subject of this book. Its history and culture are beautifully recorded in the photographs by Tomás de Elia and Cristina Cassinelli de Corral, alongside the descriptive text by César Aira ... Read the full review
VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain reviewed by Matthew Girolami
VELVET RODEO by Kelly McQuain Bloom Books, 42 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami Between a single dawn and dusk, I shadowed a speaker through adolescence and into adulthood, from young summers in West Virginia to liquored confessions in Mexico. Kelly McQuain’s Velvet Rodeo is a rare chapbook that spans such lengths—though, that is one of poetry’s potentials: every verse paragraph a vignette. And yet while McQuain’s poems are distinctively narrative, they are rife with imagery; from nature to anatomy, McQuain’s imagery evokes experience, from discovering one’s body to discovering parental fallibility. It is fitting then that Velvet Rodeo’s opening poem, “Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers,” begins spiraling outward, from pastoral aesthetics to something more existential: Your brother and sister run to catch the horizon. You wade slowly through the lashing, alive with combustion, eager for bursting. This hill, once a forest, has long been cut low, untilled, rock-strewn, stubbled with stubborn flowers. Soapwort, Queen Anne’s lace, whorled loosestrife seeded scattershot The evocative action at the beginning of this passage, “run to catch the horizon,” casts a human experience on the plainly stated imagery following; in this sense, McQuain quite literally illustrates one of the poet’s roles in this world: ... Read the full review
Edison's Ghost Machine
EDISON’S GHOST MACHINE by Jennifer Faylor Aldrich Press, 86 pages reviewed by Nodar Kipshidze It may be useful to discuss the inevitable. The unavoidable. Ancient mythology has done this well. After all, it is the myth of Prometheus told time and time again of perpetual trauma—of the unavoidable eagle descending down upon him from the heavens, pecking at his liver, or heart (as scholars contest between the two organs). But perhaps it is important to distinguish between the morphologies of the inevitable. That discussing this sort of inevitable fate is no different from the dogma of the unavoidable, only complicated by contemporary sophisms. The sort of: it was in his nature, the, he was going to fall back in with the bad crowd no matter what. The sort of unavoidable I discuss here, tonight, is the sort of act we ourselves commit, knowingly going into something we know will fail us. Perhaps is it a gambling of sorts. If we return to the myth, Prometheus steals from the gods, knowing nothing good comes from stealing from the divine, as having gone against their word once already. It is this sort of inevitable nature that we arrive to the work of ... Read the full review
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Imago
IMAGO by Lindsay Lusby dancing girl press & studio (chapbook) reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke In many ways, Lindsay Lusby’s chapbook reiterates the themes of every poet—loss, recovery, the perplexity of navigating the adult world. But Imago, in the concisest of ways, defies a typically cliché approach to these matters through weird and compelling symbolism; on the surface level, the collection is about a girl and her pet eggplant. The reader enters Lusby’s work knowing, and taking as a given, that “The girl and her eggplant / would not be parted” (1), with only a brief epigraph on etymology and psychoanalysis to alert them of the deeps ahead, not to mention the strange realization that they, too, would not be parted from this anthropomorphized vegetable. In the interstices of this work (created in large part by the poet’s choice to number certain poems as “1 ½,” “3 ¾,” etc.), it becomes apparent that the eggplant is a stand-in for the girl’s lost mother, who “did not leave a note / or a casserole” (2 ½), but did leave the wise eggplant. Though the girl’s eyes “stray in the produce section / to summer squash, zucchini” (2), we come to understand that ... Read the full review
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CHANGE MACHINE by Bruce Covey reviewed by J.G. McClure
CHANGE MACHINE by Bruce Covey Noemi Press, 122 pages reviewed by J.G. McClure Think about the change machine outside your car wash: you put in a dollar, the machine spits out coins. Not a neat bundle, but a jangling tray-full. Now think of William Carlos Williams: “A poem is a machine made of words.”Now give William Carlos Williams superpowers and have him beat the hell out of the car wash while musing on Pokémon, Barthes, and metapoetics, and you’ve got a sense of Bruce Covey’s Change Machine. Covey knows the canon well, and treats it with a mix of comic distance and yearning. Take a poem like “29 Epiphanies.” The speaker has read the classics and gleaned a lot of meaning from them – just not quite the meanings the authors had in mind. From Coleridge, we get “Just leave the albatross the fuck alone.” From Blake, “A lamb is different than a tiger,” from Dante, “Beatrice is out of your league,” and from the Greek myths, “Styx is another name for shit’s creek.” ... Read the full review
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AGOSTINO by Alberto Moravia and MR. BOARDWALK by Louis Greenstein reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
AGOSTINO by Alberto Moravia translated by Michael F. Moore NYRB Classics, 128 pages MR. BOARDWALK by Louis Greenstein New Door Books, 316 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin MUSEUMS OF INNOCENCE In September 1980, military officers took over the Turkish government. Soldiers arrested 500,000 people, executed some of them, and installed martial law. Ultimately, the coup ended years of political and economic instability, but most remarkably it led to Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and eventually its status as an emergent power. Gone were days of economic and cultural isolation—a shared national innocence that novelist Orhan Pamuk has so daringly and insistently memorialized in the novel Museum of Innocence (2008)—and before that in My Name is Red (2003) and the memoir Istanbul (2005). In these books he has rebuilt and recreated a deeply provincial, yet colorful and highly idiosyncratic world that otherwise was trapped in his head. This same instinct seems to motivate the author Louis Greenstein, a playwright, whose first novel, Mr. Boardwalk, was published last month by New Door Books. Greenstein’s museum of innocence is Atlantic City in the decade before 1978, when the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel was converted into Resorts International, the city’s first casino. Greenstein conjures this ... Read the full review
I Could See Everything by Margaux Williamson
I COULD SEE EVERYTHING: THE PAINTINGS OF MARGAUX WILLIAMSON by Margaux Williamson Coach House Books, 164 pages reviewed by Gabriel Chazan  There’s something otherworldly about the actress Scarlett Johansson. Earlier this year she played an alien in Under The Skin and, in one of the most striking paintings in the artist Margaux Williamson’s new book, I Could See Everything, she plays the universe. The painting, called I thought I saw the whole universe, is a portrait of Johansson—or more precisely the infinite landscape represented by her wearing Versace for The New York Times. The dress is hypnotic, with what seems like a galaxy in the center. The dress becomes covered in shimmering stars and triangles. Something approaching the vastness of the universe can be seen emerging in Scarlett Johansson’s absented figure and the dress, from this magazine page. This is even further eclipsed in the later painting study: universe in which the figure is entirely taken away to show only this vast space. Looking through Williamson’s book, I found myself thinking of the Canadian landscape painters in the Group Of Seven. Like the Group of Seven and more contemporary artists like Peter Doig, Williamson brings us landscapes from the Canadian ... Read the full review
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HOUSE ON FIRE by Susan Yount reviewed by Carlo Matos
HOUSE ON FIRE by Susan Yount Blood Pudding Press, 30 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Susan Yount’s House on Fire begins with a storm, more specifically with a lightening strike that splits the “sovereign catalpa”—an intriguing symbol for the fracturing of the narrator’s self, which makes us question every “she,” “her,” “I,” and “you” we encounter in the poems. The catalpa tree is mentioned four times: twice in the first poem, once in the third poem, and then again in the final poem. In “Growing Up on a Cattle Farm,” for example, the speaker says, “Cyclops drops splatter the concrete walkway / tumbles over catalpa’s wormy roots.” These beautifully euphonious and sibilant lines hide within them deeper meaning. For instance, the image of the Cyclops—the mythic creatures who toiled in the fires of Hephaestus’s volcanic workshop—is important because it invokes the father, who later in the book is likened to a devil that burns down the house and the family that lives in it. And “wormy” is an appropriate adjective because catalpa trees are often home to the caterpillar larvae of the catalpa sphinx moth, but it also takes on another valence when we realize that its secondary purpose is to foreshadow ... Read the full review
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SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE by Amy Schutzer reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE by Amy Schutzer Arktoi Books, Red Hen Press, 280 pages reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier When my mother-in-law was dying of ovarian cancer, I had no patience for fiction. That summer, I sat by her bedside, reading while she slept—Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, sent to me by a friend who worked for the National Hospice Foundation. Though I’d always sought out stories to figure out how to live, in the face of her death, I urgently needed reality-based guidance. This spring, I carried Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance with me as I spent long days in the hospital, and later hospice, with my father. That a literary novel could help me sort through the painful experience of losing him says much about Schutzer’s skill—and more about her wisdom. Compassion informs every line of her story about Helen, whose breast cancer returns metastasized, and about the circle of people who are moved by her impending death. Schutzer circumvents the expected (and dreaded) arc of a terminal illness story by shifting among nine different points of view. She advances in time through a single day and in depth through a web of interdependent ... Read the full review
A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck reviewed by Ana Schwartz
A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck Ecco Press, 128 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.” Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community ... Read the full review
ZOONOSIS by Kelly Boyker reviewed by Carlo Matos
ZOONOSIS by Kelly Boyker Hyacinth Girl Press, 39 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Kelly Boyker’s chapbook, Zoonosis, is loaded from cover-to-cover with fantastical creatures, folktale monsters, and twentieth-century “freaks” drawn from the pages of Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” The Ripley’s characters are of particular interest because they are often postmodern updates of the original chthonic creatures of Greek myth. There is a child Cyclops, for example, a tribe of crab people, and Orthus—the less-famous, two-headed brother of Cerberus. The modern-day Orthus is the result of a macabre experiment by Russian scientist, Vladimir Demikhov, who “successfully grafted the head of a puppy onto the body of a full grown Mastiff” (“Orthus”). Time and again, as this example makes clear, the true monsters of Boyker’s world turn out not to be the wolves or the so-called freaks, whom she often treats with compassion and understanding, but the “ordinary” people. Even when the wolf bites, she seems to be saying, it is only acting according to its nature. The humans, on the other hand, sit dreaming of cotton panties blowing on a clothesline . . . teeth jutted forward, all the better to eat them, all the children. (“American Dictionary”) The ... Read the full review
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OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS by Hillary L. Chute reviewed by Seamus O'Malley
OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS By Hillary L. Chute University of Chicago Press, 272 Pages reviewed by Seamus O'Malley Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists by Hillary Chute contains interviews with Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, Françoise Mouly, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. If you know comics you’ll recognize this as the auteur scene, and if you don’t you’ve just been given your starter syllabus. Many of these interviews appeared before, especially in Believer magazine, but those have been expanded, and several others are appearing for the first time in print. It is a valuable record of some of the industry’s greatest talents contemplating their work, their influences, and comics culture at large. There is some precedent for such a collection, such as Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (2007), which interviewed many of the same artists. That work, as its title suggests, was more about the creative process, and Hignite was mostly interested in the physical details of draftsmanship. Chute, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is possibly the world’s only full-time graphic novel scholar, so approaches ... Read the full review
THE GALAXY CLUB by Brendan Connell reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
THE GALAXY CLUB by Brendan Connell Chômu Press, 189 pages reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner  In his novel, The Galaxy Club, Brendan Connell, who was born and raised in New Mexico, reinterprets the landscape of a small New Mexico town, insisting that the comfortable and familiar all of a sudden feel slightly foreign. Connell has published both short fiction and several novels, notably Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010) and Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chomu Press, 2012), and in The Galaxy Club, he experiments with making the conventional unconventional. From the first page of The Galaxy Club, Connell plunges his reader into a world that feels like it should be familiar but is riddled with the mythical and supernatural. I kept thinking that I should know this small, dusty town Connell describes—after all, I currently live in a small, dusty town. But Connell’s small town isn’t conventional. In a sense, it can’t be: it’s the late 1960s or early 1970s and the place bristles with sex (or anticipation of it, anyway), drugs, and rock and roll. It’s also soaked in the supernatural, which seems to stem from Connell’s interpretation of the spiritual aura of New Mexico, where he still lives. In the first ... Read the full review
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MANTIC by Maureen Alsop reviewed by Matthew Girolami
MANTIC by Maureen Alsop Augury Books, 68 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami This is a book of annotations, a bibliography of divination. Like any bibliography, Maureen Alsop’s Mantic is carefully researched and curated. The collection’s title, Mantic, and periodic poems within the collection, are defined by the art of divining and the many ways to do so—“Gyromancy,” “Ouranomancy,” and “Ornithomancy” to name a few—but this is not an instruction manual: Alsop lays these terms bare and explicates them through human moments in verse. As the “-mancy” titles suggest, Mantic is as a much a lexical read (or listen—read aloud) as it is an exploration of reaction; Mantic is beautiful for its teaching verse and for its honesty: with poem after poem inspired by divining, Alsop points to the many ways humanity has attempted to shape the world in its favor, whether that favor comes from desire or fear. As a result, the poems shift from their theses and speak less of divining and prediction than what innately drives these practices and, ultimately, humanity. Alsop’s poetry speaks to the sensory, material limitations of these human wishes and concerns. I urge one to read aloud because Mantic feverishly uses sound to mime ... Read the full review
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INSEL by Mina Loy reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
INSEL by Mina Loy Melville House, 176 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin You, dear reader, consummate seeker of literature in all forms, of voices in all languages, of song and fragment, of tome and flash, of ancient and modern: writers, books, are slipping through your fingers. It isn’t your fault. There’s too much to read. Every other minute, they say, a new genre is born. You can’t, certainly, keep up. The idea of it is absurd. Worse yet, there are other things to do besides reading. After all, it’s nice out, cherry blossoms are swirling in the wind, a vortex of pink feathers alighting the street corner. Maybe the best thing to do is simplify, streamline the library. Return to the classics after all these years. Read all of Dickens. Run through the American pantheon. Default to Shakespeare, or Edgar Allan Poe. No? No, of course not. Don’t be silly. There’s no reason to limit oneself. You have to keep trying. Sisyphus lives. His stack of books is growing. His tablet is pregnant with titles. But where will you start, Sisyphus, how will you choose? The first sentence, of course. The first sentence is telling. It’s the hook, the draw, ... Read the full review
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ELSA by Tsipi Keller reviewed by Lynn Levin
ELSA by Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil,  187 pages reviewed by Lynn Levin As I began reading this short novel by Tsipi Keller, I found myself enjoying what I thought was going to be a leisurely experience with chick lit. Nothing too demanding, nothing to worrisome. Elsa, at the start, is as much about the jealousies of girl friendships as it is about the protagonist’s desire for some overdue sex and true romance. About a third of the way into the book, however, the narrative becomes increasingly disturbing as Keller skillfully pitches the fascinating but dislikable protagonist, thirty-nine-year-old Elsa, into a gradually darkening labyrinth of seduction and danger. I so wanted to reach into the story and shake Elsa. “Get out of there while you can!” In the meantime Gary, Elsa’s wealthy middle-aged date, whispers in her ear in a velvet voice, “You’re a fool...So trusting.” Elsa is the third in Tsipi Keller’s trilogy of psychological novels. The first two were Jackpot and Retelling, which trace the fortunes of women. Elsa calls to mind some of Richard Burgin’s noir fiction. Both writers explore the world of nefarious, but initially engaging, operators who insinuate themselves into the lives of lonely strangers aiming to ... Read the full review
FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE by Charlotte Boulay reviewed by Matthew Girolami
FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE by Charlotte Boulay Ecco Press, 64 pages reviewed by Matthew Girolami You are in a field, a forest, or on a shore; you may have never been here before, but it brings forth some immense longing. Until last summer I had never been to the prairie, but it is strange how I miss it now—I miss its monolithic emptiness, and how it made me feel like a tiny monolith myself. We miss something or someone because we feel we belong there or with them. The speakers of Charlotte Boulay’s debut poetry collection, Foxes on the Trampoline, feel their selves or their emotions belong in or to other, natural beings. Boulay articulates this longing through natural imagery—though not as descriptions, as per the nature poem’s tradition, but as part and parcel of the human experience, juxtaposed to want, love, and loss. Take “Senza,” (Italian for “without”) from Part One of the collection: Jane says her grandfather cage-raised foxes. She remembers While these lines depict a man possessing animals as objects, the second line of “Senza” embodies Boulay’s unique employment of nature imagery: no longer as object but subject; joined with Jane on the same line, the “cage-raised ... Read the full review
TwERK by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat
TwERK by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs Belladonna, 110 pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat The challenge in reading sound poetry is to try to grasp the full depth of the work’s significance without having the performance as a guide. The challenge for the poet, then, is to craft work of equal aural, intellectual and emotional stimulation. In her first full-length collection, TwERK, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs creates seemingly infinite layers of meaning that meld to produce critical social statements on both a global and region-specific scale. Certainly, experiencing her interactive performance adds nuanced shades of perspective, but the poems themselves are wealth worth reading. Diggs’s lingual acrobatics often focus on syncretized cultural elements that speak to a new societal fabric. Opening the collection with a verse from “Genesis” that refers to a monolingual world, Diggs then plunges us into Babylonian chaos. She entitles the first section “anime”—those of Generation X and beyond will know that anime combines elements of American pop-culture and Japanese characterization—and the first poem of the section discusses a Japanese subculture that glorifies a modern version of blackface: extreme tanning. Many poems in this section explore the simultaneous sampling of Black American culture and rejection of Black American physiology. Who ... Read the full review
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FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR by Diane Johnson reviewed by Colleen Davis
FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR by Diane Johnson Viking, 265 pages reviewed by Colleen Davis It takes guts to become a writer. Not because it’s a dangerous profession, but a person drawn to serious writing often discovers that there’s no clear employment path. Some people pursue newspaper or magazine jobs, and these positions can offer training and guidance to novice writers. But for those like me, who feel no calling for hard journalism, becoming a writer has meant making a series of strange, often irrational, choices. The careers of beloved authors provided me with my only roadmap. Unfortunately, most of the writers I admired were men who never faced the same social dilemmas (marry/don't marry; kids/no kids, etc.) that stymied me, a resolute female from birth. Despite the gender issues, Fitzgerald and Hemingway inspired me to pursue the expatriate tradition. I traveled in France, Brazil, and Japan. I moved to Mexico, lived on a vineyard in Italy. I searched for unusual opportunities to write and when they were not forthcoming, I invented new ones. My efforts brought me years of random joy and satisfaction. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled on the novels of Diane Johnson. It was incredibly reassuring to ... Read the full review
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APOLLO by Geoffrey Gatza BlazeVOX
, 168 pages reviewed by Carlo Matos Geoffrey Gatza’s Apollo is an all-out assault on the reader, like facing an opponent who senses you’re about to wilt and so presses the action. Every time we think we know what he’s doing, another surprise comes our way. And this is how good conceptual poetry should be—not just the simple execution of a clever conceit but a text that threatens at every turn to burst from the inside out and take the reader with it but never does. Taking the shape of a souvenir program for a one-night performance of Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name, the book contains a myriad of Dada-like exercises: poems generated by a John Cage-like method of assigning words to each square on a chess board and to each piece and then playing out the game between Marcel Duchamp and then US chess champion, Frank Marshall, at the Chess Olympiad in Hamburg in 1930 (accompanied by pictures of each position and a cat), an Arthurian legend based on the Lady of Shallot, a three-act play where Duchamp somehow manages to play himself as Rrose Sélavey (his female alter-ego), and a business letter to ... Read the full review
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THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL by Luis Chitarroni reviewed by Ana Schwartz
THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL by Luis Chitarroni translated by Darren Koolman  Dalkey Archive Press, 256 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care that we’d be late, and, above all, because those from whom we waited turned out to be ourselves, which is to say, the others, the ones we called, ‘the slow ones.’ – The No Variations Readers can only hope to be included in that community, that “we,” for the community described so affectionately here makes this one of the most memorable passages from The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni’s dense and often disorienting new non-novel. The passage appears early in the text, while expectations of narrative continuity still hold purchase. Lateness, in fact, extends hope for a plot, and with its charisma buys patience against the frustrations of plots subsequent absence. Instead of plot, the novel offers personality. The expansiveness and potential inclusivity of this passage pleasurably inscribes the writer himself; yet the same sort of expansiveness can slide easily into solipsism, an overindulgent memoirish quality. The No Variations balances between anecdote and comprehensive narrative. The tension between the two appears as ... Read the full review
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AMERICAN SONGBOOK by Michael Ruby reviewed by Ana Schwartz
AMERICAN SONGBOOK by Michael Ruby Ugly Duckling Presse, 144 pages reviewed by Ana Schwartz Imagine a road trip across America, probably in the summer, “in the good old plastic gasoline / Pell-mell summertime.” Of course, music will be an essential part of the journey, probably radio hits. Headed East, perhaps, the lyrics of each song traverse both geography and time: a path paved in words. The lyrics to these songs linger in memory, but they’re also so ephemeral—though the words remain, their thrill often fades along with the little experiential details that make any such trip unique. Between the transient intensity of experience and the permanence of a material archive, exists poetry, transcription of verbal and nonverbal song on a page, lending it a more lasting presence. Each poem in Ruby’s latest collection, American Songbook, riffs on or responds to a canonical piece of American pop music, and appears chronologically, spanning the American radio-waves from the 1930s (Bessie Smith’s “Pinchbacks” to the cusp of the twenty first century (Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana’s “Smooth”). This sequence of poems presents a narrative of personal experience, but the individual experience of pleasure in pop music is at the same time an experience ... Read the full review
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MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK
MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK Curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M.V. David Edited by Leonard S. Marcus Harry N. Abrams Press, 224 pages reviewed by Tahneer Oksman In a collaborative comic strip published in The New Yorker in 1993, cartoon versions of Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak amble through a forest littered with their own creations peeking out at them from the background. Sendak’s character wisely pontificates, “Childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly…” In the final panel, he adds, “I knew terrible things. But I knew I musn’t let adults know I knew.” Those of us who grew up reading Sendak’s beloved children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are—which is to say, very many of us—undoubtedly recognize in those words the strange and titillating worldview that belonged to the wolf-suit wearing Max. In a gorgeous 200-plus page coffee table book recently published by Abrams and in conjunction with a 2013 Sendak retrospective, Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, readers can immerse themselves in this vivid worldview. The book is broken up into eleven chapters, each focused on a different ... Read the full review
THE UNDERSTORY by Pamela Erens reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
THE UNDERSTORY by Pamela Erens Tin House Books 169 pages (originally published by Ironweed Press in 2007) reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner I began Pamela Erens’ The Understory to find the main character, Jack Ronan Gorse, peering inside his coffee cup to reassure himself that he is indeed drinking black coffee. As someone who also only drinks black coffee, I identified with Gorse’s need to ensure the absence of cream and sugar. Of course, Gorse’s habit has an interesting origination; it developed after once finding sour milk in his coffee. This first introduction to Gorse is a telling  characterization of him; he is a man in love with his habits and his routines, yet at the same time, restricted by them, using them to repress his desires for love and companionship. Gorse even goes so far as to insist that he cannot tolerate the company of other people, yet he is drawn to Patrick, a stranger, who he allows to distract his thoughts and upset his routine. The quiet of a familiar apartment lined with familiar books. The quiet of the flora and fauna of Central Park and the quiet of a favorite booth in a favorite diner. The quiet of ... Read the full review
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ON LOVING WOMEN by Diane Obomsawin reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore
ON LOVING WOMEN by Diane Obomsawin Drawn & Quarterly, 94 pages reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore “On Loving Women”: it sounds like a treatise. But Diane Obomsawin does not deliver the usual tome with this intimately illustrated collection of coming out stories, nor does she intend to. In contrast to similarly named philosophical texts such as Aristotle's On the Soul or Arthur Schopenhaur’s infamous On Women, On Loving Women presents ten vignettes of first love without explanation or elaboration: they are whole ideas, answers unto themselves. And they are utterly delightful to read. Obomsawin begins each short narrative in On Loving Women with the speaker’s name and a single- or double-panel snapshot of her in her natural habitat: in a chair with a drink or dressed as Zorro, sword and all. For one speaker, Catherine, Obomsawin forgoes props to highlight her big, awkward eyes. These introductions could have easily verged into the expected, but Obomsawin ensures that her readers have an added layer of complexity to work through: all of her speakers, from start to end, are animals. Mice, birds, bulls, pigs – at times, discerning one breed from another proves difficult. Obomsawin’s minimal lines accommodate similarities between the speakers ... Read the full review
THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE by Dennis Must and DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA by Joan Chase, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE by Dennis Must Red Hen Press, 232 pages DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA by Joan Chase NYRB Classics (new edition), 215 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin GROWING UP, MID-CENTURY Childhood is a kind of endlessly swelling pregnancy; the womb stretches and through the amniotic fluid of rooms and voices, odors and faces, the adult world becomes slowly traceable yet still distant, incomprehensible. Once in a while it ruptures and the child is forced to “grow up fast.” Otherwise, it’s the child who must give birth to her adult self.  But perhaps I’m oversimplifying: for every child, eventually, will have to negotiate the various thresholds to the adult world and will do so not in a linear progression, but rather in some sort of prolonged iterative process of seeking and receiving, receiving and seeking, a rain shower that comes and goes, once in a while revealing sun. And society has erected its own regiment of boundaries, some known, some unexpected; almost all of these require some kind of an appointment with sex or death. Such are the haunting conditions in which we emerge as full grown members of our species that we come to ... Read the full review
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Dear Gravity
DEAR GRAVITY by Gregory Djanikian Carnegie Mellon University Press, 104 pages  reviewed by Anna Strong At the beginning of the fourth section of Gregory Djanikian’s Dear Gravity, in a poem titled “Beginnings,” the speaker, one of two “giddy / amnesiacs of the present” under the ‘disapproving glance of history’ gestures outwards: Here’s a new window to turn to, here’s a cloth to clean the mists (“Beginnings”) Though the poem comes at the beginning of the penultimate section, it is in many ways a suggestion for how to read the entire collection: as one enormous room of infinite windows to turn to, an insistence on presence in each individual poem, and an acknowledgement that history, however disapproving, is unavoidable, in both poetry and in memory. So many of those windows look out on landscapes and cityscapes, from Alexandria to Arizona to Philadelphia. Language preserves the memory and the feeling of those landscapes against one another and allows them to exist in the same poetic space. In “First Winter in America,” Djanikian’s speaker, experiencing the first snow and ice of winter, is suddenly afraid to forget the desert, and the language of the desert: White eyelashes, white mittens, I thought I could ... Read the full review
More Than You Know
MORE THAN YOU KNOW by Melissa Malouf Dalkey Archive Press, 240 pages Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier Melissa Malouf’s More Than You Know intrigued and perplexed me right from its disorienting start. I’d barely landed on the first page when I fell down a rabbit role with narrator Alice Clark, chasing characters I hadn’t yet met: Hannah Jensen and her husband Bradley, always called Mr. Jensen; Barbara Delaney from Las Vegas; the “three dead young men,” Eric Langland, Richard Stone and Darrell Farnsworth, grad students in English and American Literature at UC Riverside. Unmoored (by early retirement) from teaching at a California community college, Alice doesn’t decide so much as she is compelled to travel cross country to Vermont to confront the Jensens and her role in her friends’ deaths. Through Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Peoria to the Jensens’ home in Chittenden, Vermont, Alice pursues a psychological mystery for which the only way forward is back. Her “mad undertaking” is a puzzle she puts together in real time with the reader, a year after her road trip—and decades after her loss. “Untimely deaths is a phrase one could use to make a tidy story of it,” she says. “If one ... Read the full review
Dept of Speculation
DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill Alfred A. Knopf, 177 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost Here’s an idea for a book party. Hold it in the Guggenheim. Set up an exhibit of all the pages of the book. Frame each page and display them in sequence, ending at the bottom of the ramp. Enlarge the pages 10X the size of the Borzoi Book edition pages, because the first line of the book is “Antelopes have 10X vision, you said” but also so that it’s possible for many viewers to be reading a single page. Hope for crowds. Leave the walls behind the framed pages white, to call attention to the writer’s use of white space as well as the visual appeal of the blocks of text in this accomplished second novel. See if anyone at the bottom of the ramp wonders if the experience of the novel is like what could happen if, say, Rothko had created a series of paintings to be viewed sequentially and that expressed an artist’s emotionally fraught love story. Or maybe if Terrence Malick created an exhibit of still photographs that told a similar story. The passages that make up Jenny Offill’s 46 brief chapters ... Read the full review
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THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL by Elizabeth Cohen reviewed by Michelle Fost
­THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL by Elizabeth Cohen Other Press, 256 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost Like so many of the characters in Elizabeth Cohen’s fifteen incisive stories in The Hypothetical Girl, Emily in the title story is truly suffering. Her affliction is contemporary. Girl meets guy online, falls hard for him, and is rejected by him before their relationship ever has a chance to develop out in the real world. What happens when people connect online, on sites like Letsgethooked.com, Flirtypants.com, and Yummybaby.com? Many of the stories have a sad, humorous and twisted logic. Emily—who meets Nick on Matchmaker.com—walks right into the new anxiety. “I think I miss you,” she says to Nick. “Can one miss someone one has never met?” Nick’s answer (“You can, but it is ridiculous”) is devastating. In a way, it is a simple case of unrequited chat love. Nick does not see Emily as a real person, only as an online chat partner. Cohen captures his problematic point of view: “‘You are not an actual girl,’ he wrote. ‘You are hypothetical.’” Emily’s feelings for Nick, a guy locked away in the online universe, lead her to experience herself—not Nick!—as less and less real. She is overwhelmed ... Read the full review
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The Dismal Science
THE DISMAL SCIENCE by Peter Mountford Tin House Press, 275 Pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin It seems fitting that Peter Mountford’s novel, The Dismal Science, is being published just as certain global emergent markets—Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, nicknamed by investors the “Fragile Five”—are failing. As the book opens, in 2005, at a World Bank conference in Washington, DC, Vincenzo D’Orsi, a Milan-born, 24 year veteran Bank economist, is leading a panel discussion on the state of global markets. The subtext of his introductory talk, in the woozy gestalt of Bank and IMF bureaucrats: Politics had matured, capitalism was working. Stability had taken hold and the emerging markets were now actually emerging. “It’s almost on autopilot,” says Vincenzo. Vincenzo is speaking of himself, too. Professionally, he’s peaked, after a long climb through the bank’s politicized bureaucracy; fundamentally allergic to simplistic, ideologically fraught rhetoric, he’s grown bored of spouting the corporate line. He knows he could give the same speech next year and the year after that, endlessly collecting a bloated paycheck and playing speed chess with his best friend Walter, a Washington Post reporter, on the weekends. But like those emerging markets today, Vincenzo is about to send ... Read the full review
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Encyclopedia of Early Earth
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH by Isabel Greenberg Little, Brown and Company, 176 Pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott There is no sole way to tell the story of our planet. Whether one chooses to uphold a belief rooted in science, religion, or some amalgamation of the two, our interpretation of man’s early days will never be a precise match to that of our neighbor. Many origin stories regarding that ancient spark of life cross cultures that span the globe, each holding vaguely similar elements and lessons with the introduction of new heroes, heroines, beasts, and locations. Isabel Greenberg has taken this philosophy into account in her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. Though not a non-fictional encyclopedia, Greenberg has reinterpreted familiar childhood stories of valiant journeys, jealous siblings, and—of course—the gravitational pull we call love. Her tales, which are framed as the life story of a nameless Nord man, are set in a much earlier and much colder time. Following the Nord man as he journeys beyond the horizon, we learn that a soul can indeed be split into three separate human bodies and returned again into one, that elderly women will go to murderous lengths just to ensure ... Read the full review
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The Old Priest
THE OLD PRIEST by Anthony Wallace University of Pittsburgh Press 2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, 170 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin "Let’s leave Limit," says Anna to her husband Phil, the narrator of Anthony Wallace’s story "Snow behind the door." Limit is a fictional New Jersey town near Atlantic City and a metaphor for the physical and emotional borders that confine Phil and the other protagonists in this searing, surprising collection. Phil and Anna want to escape—their neighborhood is in decline, the neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking—but at what cost? To what end? What’s keeping them? What’s begging them past the border? Phil and Anna could leave. She suggests they open a restaurant in an old industrial town in upstate New York that’s "just begging for this kind of thing." But Phil’s grandmother Rose is dying; they can’t leave her, not yet, anyway. He needs her too—as he listens to her own stories that wend the line between escape and acceptance. Ruth’s stories—and the stories, places, and myths that hover over other characters in this collection—exert a kind of invisible, perhaps even imagined, influence over their lives. We imprison ourselves, Wallace seems to say, in memory and habit. In "The ... Read the full review
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BLOOM IN REVERSE by Teresa Leo reviewed by Anna Strong
BLOOM IN REVERSE by Teresa Leo University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series), 104 pages reviewed by Anna Strong From the dedication page, Teresa Leo’s Bloom in Reverse props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo’s friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we’re at all like Teresa Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the the Sarah Hannahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten. Donald Hall wrote an astounding collection of poems chronicling his wife’s cancer and death, Without. Bloom in Reverse reads much like that collection—in each poem, we feel the keenness of the “without,” the strain of recollection, the reconstruction of the smallest moments of friendship and intimacy in the clearest language accessible to the speaker. Many of the poems are two-line stanzas, heavily enjambed and riddled with fragments, clauses that build and build on each other only to be let go in a kind of sigh—we feel the struggle to hold onto whatever memories come to mind, only ... Read the full review
The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich and Baghdad: The City in Verse edited by Reuven Snir reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich Princeton University Press, 449 pages BAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE edited by Reuven Snir Harvard University Press, 339 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin  Writers, this one included, have long struggled to capture in words the dynamic and multi-layered ways that cities change. Cities themselves are powerful change agents in the wider world, but they are defined and redefined constantly by the evolving tastes and desires of their residents (who themselves are always changing), technology, culture and religion, structural political and economic shifts, and the feedback loop of history and history-telling, characterized through myth, poetry, and mass media. Here’s how I try to make sense of it in Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books): Think of the city as a collection of swarming cells that change, adapt, grow, shrink, and grow simultaneously. Imagine hundreds or thousands or millions of cells, each living and dying not in parallel or even in sequence, but overlapping from one generation to the next. The whole place moves in several directions at once. Unless calamity hits, no city dies in a single instant. Despite what you read in the ... Read the full review
Here-Come-the-Warm-Jets
HERE COME THE WARM JETS by Alli Warren City Lights, 104 pages reviewed by Vanessa Martini Diving into Alli Warren’s Here Come the Warm Jets is at once exhilarating and slightly overwhelming. Warren pulls no punches with this collection. The reader is at once plunged into Warren’s intricate linguistic code, and she does not wait for or expect us to get used to her from the start. The only comparable experience I can call to mind is seeing a Shakespeare play: the language is difficult to follow at first, being at a slight remove from our everyday speech, but by the end of the first act—or the first several poems, in Warren’s case—this wall has dissolved, and we are left free to absorb as much wonderful language as possible. The collection shares a title with Brian Eno’s 1974 album, and this gives an immediate clue to how much cultural cross-pollination Warren plays with. I am sure I have missed more than a few references, but Warren gleefully includes rappers, fashion labels, social networks, and frequently sexual slang, sometimes turning on a dime from more high-minded language: “You look out on the estuary/and it is gross/full of sentiment/did she suck it ... Read the full review
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Mermaid by Eileen Cronin
MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience by Eileen Cronin W.W. Norton, 336 pages  reviewed by Colleen Davis When I read a memoir, I feel like I’m climbing into the kitchen of someone I’ve never met to see if their recipes for life trump mine. It’s amusing—and sometimes shocking—to discover the great variety of messes humans can create with similar ingredients. Lives get twisted and re-shaped by crazy family members, creative impulses, and random events. But some people get a truly strange variable thrown into their stew. Eileen Cronin, for example, was born without legs. You might think that if you’ve spent your earthly time in prime physical condition, her story will not connect with yours. But that’s not how Cronin’s memoir, Mermaid, comes across. Sure the young Eileen is at a great disadvantage in her early years. She must “squiddle” from one place to another instead of walk. But once she’s old enough to get prosthetic legs, her challenges start to resemble those of typical teenagers. In fact, it seems that the most complex feature of Cronin’s life is not her lack of legs. She has a much tougher time navigating the shifting emotional currents set off by members of her ... Read the full review
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Scattered Vertebrae
SCATTERED VERTEBRAE by Jerrold Yam Math Paper Press, 2013 reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke Jerrold Yam’s second poetry collection was titled with care: like the image of scattered vertebrae, these poems are at once beautiful, dark, and disturbing. Yam weaves family life, social expectation, religion, and tragedy together so ornately that at times one does not realize what they’re reading. This technique generally makes for compelling and delicate poetic image, but at times the disorientation feels less deliberate—Yam’s is a poetics that requires rereading, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It is a poetics of “pleated identity” (31), turning away from singular intent or simple subject matter, and its difficulty reflects the personal sense of unease that Yam confronts throughout: unlike some collections, here one can safely equate the speaker with Yam himself. Yam’s verse is elaborate, complex by nature, for the poet dives into his own conflicted psyche in a ritual of Freudian digging. He dredges up childhood memory as well as painful scenes of the present day, from his disappointed mother’s mixed acknowledgement of him, to his stricken grandmother with curled body and “feet knotted / in wreaths and bouquets” (89). The book is writhing with sexuality, ... Read the full review
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Cardboard Piano
CARDBOARD PIANO by Rina Terry Texture Press, 102 pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat We tend to equate the word “prison” with concrete, metal and despair, ostensibly as means of change or as a tool of rehabilitation. In her new collection, Cardboard Piano, Rina Terry reveals multi-layered evidence of the transformative power of art versus stone. Anyone who is familiar with Stephen King’s prison stories, The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (or at least with the movie adaptations thereof) expects to question the prison system and to explore the humanity of both the inmates and the guards. Terry’s words push the reader to consider the realities of an in-person search for and confrontation of that humanity, in all its potential glory and obloquy. The opening salvo, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Inmates” offers a kaleidoscope through which we can feel the entire collection. Terry challenges our accepted notion of rehabilitative space as cyclical: “There is only one/direction. Single file/through metal detector.” Parole notwithstanding, the suggestion is that for most who enter, there is no hope, and what’s more, the system-keepers believe that as well. After all, “an inmate/is and inmate/is an inmate.” The guards do not ... Read the full review
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SuperLoop
SUPERLOOP  by Nicole Callihan Sock Monkey Press, 72 pages Reviewed by Anna Strong The startling beauty of Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop lies in the balance the poems strike between the specificity and universality of childhood memory. The strongest poems take us deep into a place of colorful, youthful imagination, full of the unexpected juxtapositions that only retrospection can bring. The poems retrieve those crystal-clear moments in childhood when we make our first brushes with what it means to be a grown-up—a death in the family, divorce, a new word, and ultimately, the realization that our parents are no more perfect than we are. Callihan constantly crushes and compresses those moments of innocence and experience together, as in the the title poem, where she writes “This is the way / the Tilt-a-Whirl ends / not with a smile / but with a nice ass whisper.” Every poem in the collection is richly textured and intensely visual. The colors of our childhood homes, playgrounds, and titular (“SuperLoop” is the name of a favorite carnival ride) theme parks seem brighter than ever when seen through the lens of Callihan’s poems, an effect that comes from her ability to access childhood, whether in content or ... Read the full review
LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer reviewed by Stephanie Trott
LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer Zest Books, 272 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college. Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of what her home environment lacks and what the prospect of life in a more populated setting might bring, highlighting both the positive and negative possibilities. After one final evening together with her “oldest and best friends,” the author even wonders while on the edge of slumber whether a part of ... Read the full review
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CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Anna Strong
CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS by John Sibley Williams FutureCycle Press reviewed by Anna Strong Controlled Hallucinations is a collection of questions, interiors, and barriers—stepping into the world of these poems means being alone with your thoughts and the images and associations your brain creates only in its quietest moments. The title of the collection already suggests that these poems will occupy a space far removed from the outside world, but John Sibley Williams invites readers into this space with an introduction to the collection in the form of an untitled poem (following the dedication, which is to “the coming extinctions”). The introductory poem is a series of infinitive clauses (“To be the effect. / To be a thoughtful pause / and restrained response. / To the the passion of raking nails.”) which collectively define what can be expected from the ensuing poems ... Read the full review
THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko (1956) in the first English translation by Norbert Guterman (1959) release December 3, 2013 Melville House, 140 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin  The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more precisely: it isn’t even needed. The consequences for Franciszek Kowalski, the protagonist of Marek Hłasko’s unforgettable 1956 novel The Graveyard, indeed for all of humanity, are damning enough. Slender Citizen Kowalski had fought bravely in the underground in 1945; after receiving a nearly fatal chest wound, his faith in international socialism had willed him to live. Now, at 48, the sober Kowalski is a proud Communist Party member and a factory manager in a Polish city. One night, he runs into a comrade he hasn’t seen in years. The old fighters set off to a bar to reminisce, and despite himself Kowalski gets drunk. On his way home early the next morning, Kowlalski inadvertently insults two young police officers, and without explanation they have him locked up for the night. The earnest Kowalski can’t understand what’s happening. “Under arrest?” he asks. “What for?” “Don’t you know?” “No,” Franciszek said resolutely ... Read the full review
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MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Margaret Galvan
MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt Drawn and Quarterly, 120 pages Reviewed by Margaret Galvan My Dirty Dumb Eyes, released last May, may be comic artist Lisa Hanawalt’s debut text with a major publisher, but it highlights her preexisting popularity. Indeed, Hanawalt’s text shows its chops through its diverse array of humorous comic vignettes often originally commissioned for well-known print and internet periodicals—from New York Magazine to The Hairpin. A few months prior to its release, one of these comics, “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” first printed in the pages of Lucky Peach—a magazine co-created by Momofuku-founder, David Chang—was nominated for a James Beard, the preeminent award in the culinary world. In addition to “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” where Hanawalt creatively imagines bizarre skeletons in the closet out of the public personas of renown restauranteurs, she weighs in on the world of fashion and film in other comics. Her eyes certainly are not dumb—she can speak knowledgeably about a vast swath of culture in order to poke fun at it.  But, dirty is an apt descriptor for much of her work where genitalia and evocations of sex predominate. Even in a multi-page comics review of the New York ... Read the full review
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PACHYDERME by Frederik Peeters translated from the French by Edward Gauvin Harry N. Abrams Press SelfMadeHero imprint, 88 pages Reviewed by Brazos Price  A cinematic opening: a woman’s heeled boot, a 1950’s traffic jam in bucolic Romandie, a downed elephant.   Carice Sorrel, a woman who “simply must get to the hospital,” to see her husband who has been in an accident, heads into the woods rather than wait for the elephant to be removed.  In Pachyderme, by Frederik Peeters, this transition from the road – through the woods – and into the hospital, quickly feels like a trip into the subconscious.  When Carice first sees the hospital, the reader sees her have something of an out of body experience. Ultimately, the image seems to suggest that she is replaying, reinterpreting, and reworking recent events while asleep or unconscious or insane or dead. She wanders through the hospital and her memories. Moments of unreality are interspersed in the story and generally taken with aplomb by Carice, which further suggests that she is in a dreamlike state. This, coupled with frequent jump cuts in the narrative to places without context, adds to the overall unsteadiness of any direct interpretation of what is happening ... Read the full review
GILGI, ONE OF US By Irmgard Keun reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
GILGI, ONE OF US By Irmgard Keun (1931) in the first English translation by Geoff Wilkes Melville House, 210 pages  Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin You push through the small, enclosed, almost claustrophobic rooms at the head of “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, like an exile from a provincial village, and there you are face to face with Léger’s masterwork The City. Now free of the repressive ties of the parochial, you’re not there yet. The City—the city—looms, an inscrutable machine. “At once spacious in its lateral spread and aggressively frontal, it offers the eye no reasonable focus and the body no comfortable place to stand,” says the show’s curator, Anna Vallye, in the deeply informed essay, “The Painter on the Boulevard,” in the exhibition catalog. “To approach is to hazard.” But Léger’s painting is no warning. Rather it’s a syncopation of the moment when Modernity wrote itself across physical and temporal space in the form of the bristling, color-flashing, mesmerizing, hard-edged, dangerously inhumane and astoundingly infinite city. Past The City, the show opens up into a vast gallery, where, almost a century on from 1919, when Léger finished the eight foot tall painting, ... Read the full review
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SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt Atticus Books, 158 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin A sidewalk dance is the step or two that strangers on a sidewalk make together in an effort to get out of each other’s way. Sometimes, says Letitia Moffitt, they naturallly move in tandem, like dancers, until they collide. Sometimes they stay that way, perpetually in each other’s path, never moving past each other. This suspended state of existence—one imagines cells tumbling around a petri dish—infects Moffitt’s novel Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books), the story of Grace Chao, a Chinese immigrant to San Francisco, and George McGee, a peripatetic and dogmatic city planner, who intercepts Grace at the diner where she waits tables, and pulls her half knowing into a life of mutual abeyance. The couple moves to Hawaii, where George designs an impossible house, fails to convince his colleagues of the importance of the latest planning ideas, and loses in a bid for city council of the town of Windward Oahu. They have a child, Miranda, who narrates some of the chapters of the book. The three McGees each struggle with identity. George has run from his unassuming Pennsylvania origins; over and over again he seeks the ... Read the full review
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BLINDING: THE LEFT WING by Mircea Cărtărescu reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
BLINDING: THE LEFT WING by Mircea Cărtărescu, in the English translation by Sean Cotter, Archipelago Books, 464 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin It starts in adolescence. The questions come to you while lying in bed (certainly now with a growing awareness of your sexuality), the walls of your room expanding into endless grainy darkness, as if the room itself could encompass the entire world: why am I here, why is there anything at all? The questions may haunt you at age 13 or 15 or 17, but by adulthood they tend to feel banal. Unanswerable, impossible, if taken seriously debilitating, they are in a word blinding, and so you tend to avert your gaze. But suppose you can’t, suppose the inviolable white light only draws you closer, to madness possibly, to paint or write or drink or pray (to what God, tell me?) almost certainly. And so perhaps you scribble, the pages of your notebooks filling with furious script, like eons of sediment piling into sad mute mountains no one else will ever excavate or carve or climb. Unless, perhaps, you are a writer of the caliber of Mircea Cărtărescu, the celebrated Romanian author of the 1996 book Blinding: The ... Read the full review
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WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman PaulDryBooks, 201 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Critics never thought much of Ettore Scola’s 1987 film La Famiglia. Vincent Camby, writing in the New York Times, said that it has “the manner of a film that was conceived as an idea…The characters and events were thought up later.” But the idea, to capture time as it drifts through a single family in the space of a single apartment, is so powerfully melancholic that I’ll sit and ache through the film any time. Even despite the soft filter gauze of the mid-1980s. That same ache ventures forth from Margaret Kaufman’s debut novel Where Somebody Waits, out this month from Paul Dry Books. The tidy paperback, with its glancing, storyteller’s prose, covers about 60 years and four generations of the Davidson family, Jews in a small Arkansas town. While La Famiglia centers on the scholarly, even-handed Carlo—it opens with the infant Carlo in his grandfather’s arms on the day of his Christening and ends at a party for his eightieth birthday—Where Somebody Waits places its focus on Ruby, a fiery beauty from a poor downriver hamlet who seizes the opportunity to marry the gentle shopkeeper Bubba ... Read the full review
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WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ By Jérémie Dres reviewed by Stephanie Trott
WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ by Jérémie Dres SelfMadeHero, 199 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott Everyone has a story, a collection of historical inner workings and familial memories that makes us who we are. But not all desire or are able to physically retrace the steps of those who laid our ancestral foundation. In We Won’t See Auschwitz, author Jérémie Dres does precisely that: embarking on a pilgrimage to Poland in search of the “drop of cool water from a spring” that he likens to his Grandma Thérèse, Dres winds his way through the history of the country and retraces his grandmother’s steps while simultaneously forging his own. The reader is dropped immediately into the action, rendezvousing with Dres in Warsaw’s historic Old Town as he searches for his grandmother’s original home on an unseasonably warm June afternoon. Together we search with him through the clouded eyes of the past for the buildings and neighborhoods his grandmother once recalled perfectly from memory, only to find that they either no longer exist or have been altered beyond recognition. Dres, eager to learn from those currently dwelling within the city walls, next meets two “young, Jewish, Polish, and hip” Varsovians who advise and ... Read the full review
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The Property by Rutu Modan reviewed by Amelia Moulis
THE PROPERTY by Rutu Modan Drawn and Quarterly, 222 pages reviewed by Amelia Moulis A family secret.  A tragic love affair.  This could well be any book of the last millennia, and yet in Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, The Property, fresh life is given to these age-old tropes.  After receiving the 2008 Eisner for her first foray into adult graphic novels with Exit Wounds, Modan’s second novel further cements her talent in exploiting the subtleties of the medium. Where Exit Wounds is a fast-paced and chaotic adventure, The Property follows similar themes in a calmer setting as a grandmother and granddaughter travel from Tel Aviv to Warsaw ostensibly to reclaim a property they lost in World War II. From the outset, grandmother Regina is established as a quick-tempered, strong-minded and endlessly stubborn character in direct opposition to the temperament of her granddaughter, Mica, who is practical and level-headed. As their personalities collide and the cracks of their relationship grow deeper, both characters find themselves steeped in a wealth of age-old grief.  Mica finds herself driven by emotion, calling her new yet ‘untrustworthy’ Polish lover (deemed untrustworthy primarily due to his heritage) when her grandmother is unwell, and Regina becomes weakened ... Read the full review
THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S by Jeanne Murray Walker Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S  by Jeanne Murray Walker Center Street, 384 pages Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier “I worry about Mother, mostly,” writes Jeanne Murray Walker in her memoir, The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s (Center Street), “but I also worry about myself, because I am beginning to get myself mixed up with her. What does it mean that, in company with her, I ‘live’ in the past so much?” This question shapes Walker’s story of caring for her mother Erna Kelley, who lost her memory and life to the disease. Seeking answers, Walker offers insight into how memory works and what remembering means. As she flies between Philadelphia and her mother’s home in Dallas, the author’s own 1950s childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, keeps flooding back. Her own life seems boxed up with her mother’s stories about driving her brothers and sisters to school in a Model A, teaching in a one-room school house, staffing the night shift alone as a hospital ER nurse—cargo that was once pulled by the “powerful locomotive” of her mother’s memory. As Erna becomes increasingly disoriented to time, place, and person, it’s as if her daughter has been uncoupled and ... Read the full review
HALF THE KINGDOM by Lore Segal reviewed by Michelle Fost
HALF THE KINGDOM by Lore Segal Melville House, 176 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost Late in life, after health issues led my grandparents to move to a retirement community called Stonegates, my grandfather referred to their neighbors as his fellow inmates. I am still puzzling over Lore Segal’s new novel, Half the Kingdom, but I think she beautifully casts some theatrical lighting on the full inner lives and personal histories of the inmates. It’s as though Segal lifts a lid on what she might call, here, the Crazy Box of stories inside her aging characters. The lives of Joe Bernstine, Lucy Friedgold, Samson Gorewitz, Ida Farkasz, and a few others intersect in the emergency room and on the seventh floor of the Senior Center of the Cedars of Lebanon hospital. The open lid won’t reveal enough: part of the story here is that though Joe, Lucy, Samson, Ida, and their peers clearly hold a wealth of stories inside them, it is painfully difficult for them to deliver their stories to the outside world.  What they wish to communicate too often is trapped and locked up inside them. In the case of Lucy, she is completely distracted by the fact that ... Read the full review
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THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit reviewed by Colleen Davis
THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit Viking, 272 Pages Reviewed by Colleen Davis  Once a month my Saturday morning yoga class swaps our beloved Iyengar teacher for a visiting Power yoga trainer from Manhattan. Captain Kate is not her real name, but that’s what I call the woman who drives us through 85 minutes of fast, challenging postures which are not all that different from our normal fare. What Kate changes is the pace of our effort and the time we spend holding each pose. Under her direction, my country classmates and I move at the speed she expects from students in her 105-degree New York studio. Our local practice site has no amped up heating system, but a class with Kate still leaves us drenched. This is her rigorous lead up to the final moment when we gratefully follow Kate’s instruction to “lower our head and bow our mind to the power of the heart.” After all the physical exertion we’ve just endured, this commandment becomes easier to follow and sweet to feel. Rebecca Solnit is a writer who also understands a thing or two about the power of rigor. Her writing displays a masterful command of language, imagery, ... Read the full review
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RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN By Lucy Knisley reviewed by Stephanie Trott
RELISH: MY LIFE IN THE KITCHEN by Lucy Knisley First Second Books, 173 pages Reviewed by Stephanie Trott Never crowd the mushrooms. It’s a mantra recited time and time again in cookbooks, culinary shows, and even some Hollywood films. But without understanding what this actually means, as one’s interpretation will invariably differ from another’s, the only result is a disappointingly inconsistent sauté. In the absence of visual representation, one may interpret crowding as tight as a tin of sardines or as light as a bag of fluffy marshmallows. Enter Lucy Knisley and her graphic memoir Relish: My Life In the Kitchen, a bright collection of stories and memories centered on food, her family, and her upbringing. Following Knisley from the countertops of her childhood apartment in downtown Manhattan to early mornings at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her homemade meals and grocery lists guide the reader through a childhood of bustling movement and taste exploration. Not one to shy away from the use of color, Knisley portrays hand-drawn interpretations of dishes long since consumed, as though they lay perfectly preserved in her mind. A self-described puppeteer, ukulele player and food/travel writer, Knisley grew up in a world ... Read the full review
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Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE STORY OF A NEW NAME by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein Europa Editions, 471 pages ELI, ELY by Ezekiel Tyrus Hardhead Press, 283 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Two Cities, Two Outsiders, Two Novels My thirteen-year-old daughter Lena got a hold of my review copy of Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Story of a New Name and the pencil stuck inside it for jotting notes in the margins. “Your journey starts now! Ready….go!” she wrote at the beginning of chapter 59 (of 125). On page 251, and then every so often to the end of the book, she wrote, “Pit Stop,” and drew icons for a bed, a cup of coffee, and the bathroom. At the start of chapter 75, she sketched stick figures of people lined up, as if along the edge of a marathon route. “Yay! You can do it! Come on!” she wrote, in a speech balloon above their heads. I didn’t need this sort of encouragement to get through the book, a striking, deeply felt, and fully imagined psychological portrait of two young women raised in a poor, particularly parochial Naples neighborhood in the early 1960s. But Lena was on to something. The book is powered ... Read the full review
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ON GHOSTS by Elizabeth Robinson reviewed by Vanessa Martini
ON GHOSTS by Elizabeth Robinson Solid Objects, 64 pages reviewed by Vanessa Martini Elizabeth Robinson’s On Ghosts is, in her own words, “an essay” that seeks to understand the idea of haunting. As many teachers—perhaps just many of my teachers—like to say, to “essay” means to try, and what Robinson tries to do is to create a haunting so slowly and carefully that at first a reader does not notice. The structure of the text is simple: many small sections compound upon one another in an attempt to understand “the phenomenon of ghosts and haunting.” What seems at first to be an Explanatory Note quickly proves itself rather similar to many sections that follow; we readers are suddenly sucked in, like hikers who swear the day was clear until fog rose all around. Though it’s hard to say whether this is Robinson’s fault or my own, the first few sections seem awkward, too wordy, at once overly precise and not clear enough. Robinson describes apparition as “Rough erasure, but not real agency, not ‘power’…It is palimpsest, implicit disclosure.” Perhaps these attempts at definition rely too much on words that are already weighted, already haunted by meaning. Perhaps this means her definition ... Read the full review
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IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST by Ruchama King Feuerman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
IN THE COURTYARD OF THE KABBALIST by Ruchama King Feuerman NYRBLit (e-book only), 203 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin As I was crossing the street just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem one evening this summer, I noticed a Palestinian boy, about 15 years old, flying a kite on the corner. It was about seven and the sun had disappeared already. The light was pink. The sky in the distance was a cloudless blue, but it seemed, at dusk, to have the texture of felt. An orthodox Jewish mother, wearing a headscarf and long skirt, came across to the traffic island, where the boy in capris and a t-shirt stood watching his kite fly over the honeycomb colored wall of the old city. The woman pushed a stroller, inside of which sat a nicely dressed boy of two. He was interested in the kite. The older boy immediately noticed the little boy’s gaze; he gestured to him and the mother let him out of the stroller. She smiled with delight as the Palestinian boy held out the kite handle and the two boys held on together, the older one keeping a casual eye on the kite, ... Read the full review
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THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS by Dave Newman reviewed by William Boyle
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE POEMS by Dave Newman White Gorilla Press, 166 pages Reviewed by William Boyle Dave Newman’s The Slaughterhouse Poems is a book about work and failure and desperation, about the ways we escape and survive and the things we do when we’re lost in the vastness of youth and sore afraid of the vastness of age. The speaker of these poems—which are all set in Western Pennsylvania between 1986 and 1989—is looking back on his days as a high school fuck-up who has just taken a part-time job at a slaughterhouse. A wide cast of characters surrounds him: slaughterhouse employees (one who is famous for juggling cow balls and ultimately gets fired for fucking a three hundred pound pig), buddies, girls he’s after, dive bar regulars, a 91-year-old bowling alley owner, too-young strippers, old men who sit on their porches with cans of Schaefer beer, and drug dealers. The book has five parts, each beginning with an italicized section from one of the poems in that part. This serves to unify the individual sections and to thread together themes that web their way through the entire book. The first italicized line, excerpted from “Jackson Pollock Could Have Saved Our Lives,” sets ... Read the full review
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THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer reviewed by Chris Ludovici
THE INTERESTINGS by Meg Wolitzer Riverhead Hardcover, 480 pages Reviewed by Chris Ludovici Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a beast of a book. At four hundred eighty pages, and covering forty years of half a dozen lives, its ambition is both broad and admirable. It is compelling when it offers a sustained, ground-level view through one of her character’s eyes, which comprises the bulk of the book. But its ambitions also exceed Wolitzer’s strengths; the book suffers from odd pacing, random shifts in perspective, and haphazard leaps in time. When considered as a whole, the pieces don’t fit together in an organic, satisfying way. The Interestings has an ensemble cast, but its lead is Jules Jacobson, who in the summer of 1974 finds herself inducted into the cool kid inner circle at Spirit in the Woods, a New England summer camp for privileged children. Jules, a plain middle class girl from Long Island who just lost her father to cancer, is attending the camp on scholarship and is immediately smitten with her new artistic friends and their upper-class Manhattan lives. There is the beautiful, open-hearted Ash; her moody, enigmatic brother Goodman; sensitive musician Jonah; emotional dancer Cathy; and the brilliant ... Read the full review
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aversive clause image
THE AVERSIVE CLAUSE by B.C. Edwards Black Lawrence Press, 180 Pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat B.C. Edwards’s short story collection, The Aversive Clause, alternates between gentle poignancy and visceral revelation, often within the same story. To read his work is to ride a manic roller coaster through a gritty Wonderland reboot. Like Alice, readers will shrink and grow, and know things they cannot un-know. Without being heavy-handed or didactic, Edwards explores and explodes the socio-political fabric of contemporary society and in so doing, pulls readers into the conversation. Edwards’s style and thematic resonance are evocative of Ray Bradbury. In particular, “The Providence of Angels” echoes several stories from The Illustrated Man. The desperate masses begging for healing outside Ty and Mac’s door calls back to the emotional hunger of the men in “The Visitor.” The random man at the rails, searching for the Angels to give him an external impetus for goodness, echoes “The Man’s” Captain Hart in his quest for Christ to give him peace. Much like “Zero Hour,” the story ends with the coming of the supernatural beings, whom only a select few can see at first, and whose breakthrough to this world becomes finally, terribly real ... Read the full review
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CALLING DR LAURA By Nicole J Georges reviewed by Amelia Moulis
CALLING DR LAURA By Nicole J Georges Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 260 pages reviewed by Amelia Moulis Nicole J Georges’ Calling Dr Laura, is an acerbic and intelligent addition to the graphic memoirs of 2013. It catalogues Georges’ troubled upbringing and her subsequent quest for love and stability in her relationships, and indeed her life at large. Georges enters this story through her first girlfriend, who takes Georges to a psychic, inadvertently uncovering a deep family secret: the psychic insists that Georges’ father – whom she was told died of colon cancer when she was a baby – is in fact alive. Although this is the ‘hook’ of the story, it is important to emphasize that this is actually not the driving force behind the storyline. It takes many years for Georges to share this information with anyone, let alone confront her mom about it. In the meantime, Georges meanders between cross-sections of her mom’s abusive relationships, the string of ‘father figures’ shaping her upbringing, Georges’ own inability to process stress and emotion, her struggle to establish a family, and the faulty dynamics of her lesbian relationships. But underneath this is the constant tension of when, or if, Georges can confront ... Read the full review
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HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott
HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart Gotham Books, 254 pages reviewed by Stephanie Trott It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class. Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details ... Read the full review
CARTOON COLLEGE by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore
CARTOON COLLEGE (video documentary) by Josh Melrod and Tara Wray L. B. Thunderpony Home Entertainment, 76 minutes reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore Within moments of its bare opening, I already liked Cartoon College. When I reached chapter three of the documentary—which dubbed comics “better than sandwiches”—I knew that I loved it. Josh Melrod and Tara Wray keep the first shot simple: the camera shows a man’s back as he rummages through old drawings. We are not coddled by music meant to make us feel happy-go-lucky or sentimental. This meditative simplicity populates the entire film, allowing viewers what feels like a filmic rarity: the ability to listen to a human voice with only that voice for guidance ... Read the full review
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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. by Adelle Waldman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P. by Adelle Waldman Henry Holt, 242 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Suburban Mid-Atlantic childhood. Check. Journalist. Check. Book reviewer. Check. Writing book review to keep from working on more substantial essay. Check. First novel coming out. Check. Writes on urbanism. Check. Closest friend Peter. Check. Name Nathaniel P. Check. That Nathaniel P? Like the fictional protagonist of Adelle Waldman’s debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., I’m happiest reading and writing; I’m ambitious enough (though the doppelganger has a large advance for his novel, something I’ve not yet received); and I can’t see myself doing anything else. The arrival of the book has made for good jokes, of course. My friend Cristina wrote me the other day to say she had received the book (she ordered it and read it as soon as I told her about it). “I have your love affairs with me,” she wrote with a wink and smile. But the Nathaniel in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. isn’t really anything like me. I don’t go by Nate, for one—ever since my little league coach called me “Nate the Rusty Gate” (I couldn’t hit)—and my Peter would never admonish ... Read the full review
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SCRATCH PEGASUS by Stephen Kessler reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke
SCRATCH PEGASUS by Stephen Kessler Swan Scythe Press, 88 pages reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke Stephen Kessler’s agenda in the poetry of Scratch Pegasus would seem to be that of the artist in his poem “Hopper”: in an era where inscrutable conceptualism has become somewhat of a standard, Kessler is confident that his “representation / so square compared to his successors’ transgressions / looks now purely formal and coolly classical … in rooms full of murmuring tourists / relieved to see what they recognize”. It’s lamentable, then, that Kessler’s altruistic aspirations towards a communitarian poetics, a poetics of reachable clarity, are troubled by an unintentional (or so one hopes) exclusion of the modern reader. True, the poet occasionally hits the mark with poignant imagery (“the barking park / where the city’s dogs / sniff each other’s butts / and tangled strips of toilet paper / fly like flags from lampposts”, “Gold light streams / through cold beer”, etc., obviousness that is not condescending but pleasantly relatable), but such imagery drowns in problematic particularities. Kessler makes clear that he is in his later years, a state of being meant to inform his poetry, but he is heavy-handed in dating himself. While certain details, ... Read the full review
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SO LONG, SILVER SCREEN by Blutch reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
SO LONG, SILVER SCREEN by Blutch Picturebox, 88 pages reviewed by Gabriel Chazan Every film is a ghost story. When we go to the theater, we see flickering images of things in the eternal past yet present which persistently haunt us. This observation cannot be avoided reading the French cartoonist Blutch’s new graphic essay/novel So Long, Silver Screen. With this book, Blutch summons the ghosts from his own filmgoing past to consider the film form. Death pervades the book from the very first panel in which a woman writes, “Adieu Paul Newman.” When the woman tells her lover Newman is dead, he reacts in disbelief: “it can’t be—I think about him every day” as if, by being captured onscreen, stars are immortal. Blutch has decided to try his hand at film criticism. The book is largely comprised of discussions and arguments between a man and woman about film. We get all of the enduring debates—theater or film, how are women treated in film, and many more. In the discussion of why film is better than theater, the unnamed woman says that “movies give us something plays don’t...faces...and to top it off, dead people’s faces, too.” The book reminds us constantly ... Read the full review
RECALCULATING by Charles Bernstein reviewed by Mary Weston
RECALCULATING by Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 208 pages Reviewed by Mary Weston  Bringing to mind the now all-too familiar GPS phrase, Charles Bernstein’s latest collection of poetry, Recalculating, depicts a poet pulled in a number of different directions and impulses. As readers, we too at times feel this pull toward the many evocations and articulations present in Recalculating. Yet in many ways, direction—or lack thereof—becomes the thematic anchor which ultimately binds Bernstein’s latest work. Poems in this collection move deftly and swiftly from heady articulations of Bernstein’s poetics, to oftentimes humorous experiments in language and syntax, to poignant translations of works from Catullus to Baudelaire. Yet throughout the collection, the theme of “recalculation” takes on a more sobering nature, as interspersed between Bernstein’s didacticism and humor, grief and loss also begin to take shape in the work, each time creating a quiet swerve and evolution in the work’s “direction.” It’s this versatility and variety throughout the collection which makes Recalculating such a compelling read, as quiet sorrow becomes inextricably linked with both the playful and the cerebral, and which nuances the work as a whole. In many ways, parts of Recalculating seem written for the well-read and well-versed ... Read the full review
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THE MEHLIS REPORT by Rabee Jaber reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE MEHLIS REPORT by Rabee Jaber translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid New Directions Paperbacks, 202 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin At night, I dream the city; I dream Baldwin’s—and Capote’s—alluring New York at mid-century; I dream Pamuk’s melancholic Istanbul of the same period; I dream Antunes’s desperate 1990s Lisbon and Nasr’s suffocating Tunis and Bolaño’s heretical 1970s Mexico City; I dream Zadie Smith’s London and Mercé Rodoreda’s Barcelona; I dream my own Philadelphia, which sometimes isn’t Philadelphia at all (it may be Brooklyn or Montreal). Now, I dream Rabee Jaber’s early 21st century Beirut; I dream the enduring disquiet, I dream the hidden springs, I dream the memories (of terraces filled with mulberry trees, of abandoned villas), the loss, the fear, the cranes that rattle the sky. “How many cities are hidden in the belly of this one city?” writes Jaber, At rare times, you see all these cities together. At night, when you push the window open, outward, and hear the wooden shutters bang against the wall, and then retreat into darkness, your heart jumps. The Mehlis Report, in English translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is Jaber’s first to be offered to the American reader. At 42 years old, he’s ... Read the full review
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DAVID LYNCH SWERVES by Martha P. Nochimson reviewed by Chris Ludovici
DAVID LYNCH SWERVES: UNCERTAINTY THROUGH LOST HIGHWAY TO INLAND EMPIRE by Martha P. Nochimson University of Texas Press, 295 pages reviewed by Chris Ludovici In David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty Through Lost Highway to Inland Empire, Martha P. Nochimson presents a radical interpretation of David Lynch’s last four movies. She rejects the popular critical interpretations of his work, in favor of her own theory: a complicated mix of eastern philosophy and quantum physics. It’s fascinating, challenging, frustrating, and only intermittently persuasive. Her ideas are compelling, especially when she’s addressing Lynch’s philosophy. As a devoted believer in Hinduism and tantric meditation, Lynch creates movies with strong spiritual components. They are intense stories, and his characters are often emotionally troubled. Nochimson clearly and thoughtfully explains Lynch’s repeating themes of the dangers of life lived in the service of greed and ambition, and his commitment to spiritual peace over material satisfaction. But it’s her more radical, scientific ideas that are troublesome. Quantum physics isn’t exactly simple, and frankly, I don’t have enough knowledge on that subject to understand anything beyond her most superficial points. But here’s the part that’s tricky: the book is unclear as to whether or not Lynch does, either. When Nochimson uses ... Read the full review
THE HARE by César Aira | reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE HARE by César Aira New Directions Paperbacks, 218 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin The writer César Aira has a charming trait (at least in the English language translations of his books published by New Directions): at the end of his novels, he inscribes the date he completed the work, at least so we are supposed to believe. For both The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, published in Katherine Silver’s English translation by New Directions last year, and The Hare, which New Directions brings out tomorrow translated by Nick Caistor, were apparently finished the same day, September 6, 1996. Could this really be? Aira, the author of some 70 works of fiction and essay, is after all one of the most prolific writers in the world. It is conceivable he completed the two books on the same day. Or has Aira, a master of meta-fiction, found yet another way to invite the reader to contemplate the nature of reality, the possibility of storytelling, and the absurdities of perception? “Between one story and another,” he writes in The Hare, “even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a ... Read the full review
RUST BELT RISING ALMANAC, Vol. 1 reviewed by Ariel Diliberto
RUST BELT RISING ALMANAC, Vol. 1 Various Authors The Head & The Hand Press, 168 pages  reviewed by Ariel Diliberto Rust Belt Rising Almanac presents a pastiche of short stories, poems, photographs and artwork. Collectively they form a fairly complete image of the post-industrial cities that comprise the toponymous “belt” (in the case of this publication, namely Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh). Collectively being the operative word. For individually, some of the stories are flashes in the (rusting) pan. However, together these ethereal dispatches evoke the negative space inside an abandoned factory building, and upon reaching page 168, readers can step back and see it for what it is. So what is it? The triumph of Rust Belt is its ability to dispel the false narrative about America’s trajectory from industrial to post-industrial, in which the peak of our society was the peak of the industrial era, and it’s been downhill ever since. Put another way, the idea that when factories were pumping in the hearts of these cities, it was the “good old days,” and now that they’ve shut down or relocated, despair ensues. Rust Belt demonstrates that a) the “good old days” weren’t always all that good, as Kim ... Read the full review
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BARNABY VOL. 1 by Crockett Johnson | reviewed by Travis DuBose
BARNABY VOL. 1 by Crockett Johnson introduction by Chris Ware; Art direction by Daniel Clowes Fantagraphics, 336 pages reviewed by Travis DuBose In his foreword to its first collected volume, Chris Ware compares Barnaby, Crockett Johnson's 1940s newspaper strip, to other early influential comics like Little Nemo, Krazy Kat and Peanuts. He goes on to say that Barnaby is “the last great comic strip,” a description that ends up being a little unfair to any first time readers of Barnaby: though there are moments of greatness in it, Volume One mostly points forward to the strip's potential, rather than showcasing Johnson's brilliance firsthand. This difficult start is consistent with the beginnings of other strips, even great ones: the ability to deliver a solid joke, every day, in three or four panels is mastered by very few and even fewer, if any, can do it consistently from the first strip. Barnaby, however, has one of the best rocky starts I've encountered in the medium, and its later greatness is well worth its early fumbles. Crockett Johnson may not have the immediate name recognition of Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson, but his work is a mainstay of American childhoods: he authored Harold ... Read the full review
NO APOCALYPSE by Monica Wendel reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke
NO APOCALYPSE by Monica Wendel Georgetown Review Press, 70 pages reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke Monica Wendel makes every pretense of proving the veracity of her title, No Apocalypse, in her debut collection: as if responding to the question “What are some topics of poetry?” the poet has organized her work in orderly divisions—Politics, Dreams, Animals and Cities, Money and Ghosts—lending an everything-under-control sensibility to the book on the surface level. Indeed, her treatment of what many would consider signs of apocalyptic societal devolution – Wikileaks, the Trayvon Martin case, etc – is surprisingly deadpan, as if, in declarative ending lines, Wendel is grimly calming a gloom-and-doom hysteric. As such, when trauma does make an entry, it is all the more traumatic for its surprise, as in the poem “September, Red Hook”; at first glance the poem is whimsical, a charming exchange between two children as they float a piece of stale bread downriver (“a raft for a mouse who’s getting tired of swimming”), and by the time the reader realizes that the poem is set in the aftermath of 9/11 (“‘Or maybe,’ I said, ‘it’s a landing raft for someone in the ashes who jumped’”), it is the final stanza ... Read the full review
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THE SENSUALIST by Daniel Torday reviewed by Michelle Fost
THE SENSUALIST by Daniel Torday Nouvella Books, 177 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost I've been thinking a lot about how I am at once very connected to and disconnected from Germany, and I’ve been exploring this feeling in a novel I’m working on. My grandparents were German Jewish refugees, sailing from Hamburg, Germany, to Ellis Island in 1934. We talked very little, my grandparents and their grandchildren, about their lives in Germany before they left. If their lives were an apartment building, it was as though we always entered on the third floor, and were welcome to walk around anywhere from the third floor and up but never below. We didn’t notice anything unusual. Obviously, there are good reasons for not talking about what was left behind by German Jews who escaped the holocaust. But there is also tremendous loss in disowning all of it. Sam Gerson, the narrator of Daniel Torday’s novella The Sensualist, has a similar relationship to his grandfather and his past. His grandfather rarely talks about his background as a Jewish Hungarian refugee, and Sam has not been especially curious. But Torday gets across the surprising strength and importance of the experience of the past generation—as ... Read the full review
The Office of Mercy
THE OFFICE OF MERCY by Ariel Djanikian Viking, 304 pages Reviewed by John Carroll I had the good fortune of reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood,and the Prison of Belief immediately before picking up Ariel Djanikian’s debut novel, The Office of Mercy. While Wright’s nonfiction account of a minor religious movement is, on the surface, seemingly far removed from Djanikian’s novel about a futuristic American settlement, the two books share much more in common than anyone could initially believe. In particular, Scientologists and the America-Five residents in The Office of Mercy are equally concerned with the ethics of their individual movements. But both groups have arrived at ethical standings far removed from what a contemporary American majority would define as acceptable. While Wright narrates numerous confessionals about physical and emotional abuse in the Church of Scientology, Djanikian introduces readers to the “sweeps” of America-Five: these carefully planned strikes eliminate Tribespeople who live “Outside” – that is, beyond the enclosed settlement of America-Five or similarly numbered settlements established after a globe-altering event known simply as “the Storm.” We learn about America-Five and the titular Office of Mercy through inhabitant and office employee Natasha Wiley. Natasha is an Epsilon, a name ... Read the full review
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WOMEN'S POETRY: POEMS AND ADVICE by Daisy Fried University of Pittsburgh Press, 88 pages Reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat Daisy Fried’s new collection, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, illuminates issues that are both specifically feminine (i.e. mother-daughter paradigms) and gender neutral (being American in a foreign land). Divided into four numbered sections, the poems explore the layers of complicated relationships and expose the emotions therein. Fried shows us how beauty forces us to notice it, even when we’d rather not. Through several reflexive lines that connect to other poems within the text, she speaks to the multi-layered nature of art. The Advice Column Section gives Fried latitude to launch a sweet and snarky rant against those who place themselves outside and against the world of women and words. How absolutely accurate, and satisfactory, to hear that the only difference between a male poetess (she “applies the term poetess to men and women, good poetesses and bad”) and a female poetess is that a male poetess is free to overtly comment on another male poetess’ body, whereas no matter how far we’ve come, body image issues can remain a no-fly zone for female poetesses. Her advice to Mr. Martyr (“try champagne, oysters, ... Read the full review
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THE END by Anders Nilsen reviewed by Henry Steinberg
THE END by Anders Nilsen Fantagraphics Books, 80 pages Reviewed by Henry Steinberg The Humming Bird. The Condor. The Giant. The Hands. I hold your head in my hands and your heart in my heart and I look at you and I am floating above the bed alone and there's nothing I can do at all because you're gone. These are the Nazca Lines. Located in the southern desert of Peru, these ancient geoglyphs dot the landscape, their purpose unknown, their mystery immense. Carved into the earth by the Nazca Peoples, the exact date of their creation is impossible to pin down, but researchers believe they were made between 400-650 BCE. When standing on top of the lines, within them, it is impossible to discern the shapes of the designs, though they are figurative and quite complex. One needs the great distance and height of the surrounding foothills to see and understand their intricacy. In 2005, Anders Nilsen’s fiancé Cheryl Weaver died after a long battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That’s when Nilsen began writing and drawing in his journals – laying down in lines the solid grief that would become The End. His drawings are not of the Nazca Lines, ... Read the full review
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DANIEL J. ISENGART by Filip Noterdaeme reviewed by Michelle Fost
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DANIEL J. ISENGART by Filip Noterdaeme Outpost19, 351 pages Reviewed by Michelle Fost  Because Gertrude Stein wished readers would pay more attention to the ambitious but largely unread work she considered her masterpiece, The Making of Americans, she had a tendency to knock her very popular Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Years ago, as a young fiction writer working on a master’s thesis on The Making of Americans, I sometimes identified with Stein.  Here she is, in that book, wondering if her work will be read: Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver,—but anyhow reader, bear it in your mind—will there be for me ever any such a creature… listen while I tell you all about us, and wait while I hasten slowly forwards, and love, please, this history of this decent family’s progress. I was impressed by her direct expression of a longing to be read, and the lonely seriousness of her project. Like Stein, I championed her neglected work ... Read the full review
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THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner reviewed by Chris Ludovici
THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner Scribner, 400 pages Reviewed by Chris Ludovici Early in Rachel Kushner’s occasionally frustrating but fascinating book The Flamethrowers, the protagonist sleeps with a man she’s only just met. She naively believes that her encounter with the attractive, nameless stranger is going to lead to something more meaningful, and she is more than a little disappointed to find him gone when she wakes the next morning.  He leaves a mark on her, though, both by taking her virginity and also by giving her the only name we will know her by, Reno, after the city she was born and raised in. It’s a fitting name for the heroine of this novel, which is, principally, about starting over, on both an individual as well as national level. All the characters in The Flamethrowers are interested in reinvention; they ache to transcend their compromised human past into a more perfect, harmonious present and future. Fresh out of college with a degree in film, Reno arrives in New York, ready to live. She’s a born gear head, she loves motorcycles and speed, and she’d like to do something with her camera, but all she’s got is some grainy film ... Read the full review
TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE by Ulli Lust reviewed by Tahneer Oksman
TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE by Ulli Lust translated by Kim Thomson Fantagraphics Books, 460 pages Reviewed by Tahneer Oksman Note: Lust’s memoir was edited and translated into English by comics visionary Kim Thompson, who passed away earlier this week. This book, along with countless others, is a tribute to his legacy. --T.O. Why weren’t more women dharma bums, taking trips across the country like the Kerouac’s and Cassady’s and Snyder’s of On the Road and beyond? Why weren’t more of them trekking up desolation mountains, sleeping in boxcars, bumming cigarettes and hash and old paperbacks and swigs of wine from strangers?* Ulli Lust’s thick graphic memoir, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, though set in the early 1980’s, decades after most of the beats had already burned out, and continents away – taking place in Austria and Italy – offers a potential answer, in the form of Lust’s own resounding howl. The book features snapshots in the life of a girl, a newly self-affiliated punk raised just over the western side of the Iron Curtain. At almost seventeen, she sets off on foot for Italy with just the clothes ... Read the full review
THE TRANSLATOR by Nina Schuyler reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
THE TRANSLATOR by Nina Schuyler Pegasus Books, 352 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin I noticed, earlier this week, that my friend Cristina Vezzaro had been posting on Facebook in Dutch. This shouldn’t have surprised me. Still, I wondered, “Have you added a new language?” “I took Nederlands while in Geneva 20 years ago. I am just trying to refresh what I knew and learn it better,” she replied. Vezzaro, after all, is a literary translator, who translates novels from the original German and French to Italian; but Cristina was born multi-lingual, in a part of Italy near Germany and Switzerland, and she acquires languages as some do shoes or kitchen appliances. I’ve witnessed her almost immediate acquisition of American English, slang and all. Hanne Schubert, the protagonist of Nina Schuyler’s quietly perceptive new novel The Translator, is one such character, an expert translator of several languages with a special expertise in Japanese. Like Vezzaro, she is primordially multi-lingual. Schubert, whose childhood and education took her all over the world and who eventually settled with Japanese husband, an ambitious chemist, in San Francisco, is at home almost everywhere—and yet nowhere. Now a widow, the intensely (and rather moralistically) disciplined Schubert is ... Read the full review
HE LOOKED BEYOND MY FAULTS AND SAW MY NEEDS by Leonard Gontarek Hanging Loose Press, 88 pages reviewed by Brandon Lafving Reading John Ashbery’s early works in college, I remember begging the poetry to make a goddamn point. My yearnings for intellectual coherence went unanswered, regardless of how much attention, how many thoughts I piled up on the poems. No matter how hard I tried, my efforts were resisted. I have often wondered since: what would happen if Ashbery were crackable? I even made a number of attempts, myself. Leonard Gontarek’s fifth book, He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs, finally answers my question. A casual reader might see in this collection - the pole-vaulting mindset, the penchant for painterly imagery, or the ability of certain, magical phrases to hold an entire universe of subjective meaning – and presume in this postmodern sepulcher of ours that there are no intellectual underpinnings. For instance, one of the first poems of the book, "Imago Mundi", shows off some of the gifts of super-abstraction: There was the wolf that ate his leg, then his other one. Then ate all of him. You would think sorrow would disappear too. But apparently that is ... Read the full review
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CARNIVAL by Rawi Hage | reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
CARNIVAL by Rawi Hage Norton, 304 pages Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Fly, the narrator of Rawi Hage’s fabulist novel Carnival, released in the US on June 17, is a literature-obsessed taxi driver—and child of circus performers—who imagines himself a super-hero, avenging wrongs perpetrated on the vulnerable and the poor. Books—particularly the subversive kind—are his sword. One night, he picks up an arguing couple. The woman, Mary, is crying. Her husband berates her for her introverted, bookish ways. He wants some action. “I am tired of this, do you understand?” he says. Fly flies into a rage, forces the husband out of the car, leaves him by the side of the road, and brings “sweet Mary” back to his book-stuffed apartment. “And she laughed and walked among the garden of books,” he says, “and then we took off our fig leaves and made love in the corner, where verses from heaven touched our bare, cracked asses that hopped and bounced like invading horses in the holy lands.” ... Read the full review
RAVEN GIRL by Audrey Niffenegger reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore
RAVEN GIRL by Audrey Niffenegger  Abrams ComicsArt, 80 pages Reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore At eighty pages, Audrey Niffenegger’s Raven Girl goes by quickly. We meet two improbable lovers, who have an improbable child, who finds love in her own (you guessed it) improbable way. Raven Girl is undoubtedly a fairy tale, cooked up with ingredients of the genre that readers will identify early on – anthropomorphized animals, an unexpected road to a relationship, a metamorphosis of the body, an enemy, etc. What is truly new about this work may not be immediately apparent, but once we notice it, we recognize Raven Girl as both delectable and honorable—a new (and necessary) twist on an old recipe. With uncluttered, clean prose, and twenty-one well-selected drawings, Raven Girl is a humble work. White space cushions Niffenegger’s blocks of text on all sides, conveying the sensation that these pages are letters—perhaps even written by the Raven Girl herself, telling her story from a bird’s-eye view. Whether or not the Raven Girl was Niffenegger’s intended narrator, our fairy tale guide unconsciously resists the “why” at all turns; whoever is recounting this tale lives inside, not outside, the world of the work. The narrator does not question: ... Read the full review
EQUILATERAL by Ken Kalfus reviewed by Chris Ludovici
Ken Kalfus, reviewed by Chris LudoviciEQUILATERAL (Bloomsbury USA, 224 pages) At its core, Ken Kalfus’s Equilateral is about communication: communication between an empire and its subjects; between visionaries and those who finance that vision; between the people who plan a task and those who realize it. And— most essentially to plot while least essentially to the narrative— Equilateral is about communication between the planets Earth and Mars. In a little over two hundred pages, Kalfus manages to tell a rich, fascinating story about our need to connect with something outside of ourselves, and our inherent limitations that keep us from doing just that. The discovery of canals on the surface of Mars has led the nineteenth century scientific community to conclude that there is indeed intelligent life on our closest celestial neighbor, setting in motion a mad scramble to be the first culture to make contact with it. In Egypt, British astronomer Sanford Thayer is nearing completion of his Equilateral, a gigantic equilateral triangle, each side five feet deep and more than three hundred miles long, dug in the dessert that, once completed, will be filled with pitch and set on fire, creating a “space flare” so large it will be ... Read the full review
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DR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT by Beth Kephart reviewed by Michelle Fost
Beth Kephart, illustrated by William Sulit, reviewed by Michelle FostDR. RADWAY’S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT (New City Community Press, 190 pages) When I lived in Philadelphia, I sensed its history underfoot. One pleasure of Beth Kephart’s lively new historical Philadelphia novel is the strong fit of the writer’s project and the story she tells. In Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, Kephart looks at material from the past that we might consider lost to us and demonstrates how traces of that past stay with us through research and writing. In her story of William Quinn in 1870’s Philadelphia, too, much has been lost. As fourteen-year-old William goes in search of what has been taken from his family and as he thinks about what he is missing (including a murdered brother and a father in prison), we see that a great deal of what is loved can be recovered. William internalizes his brother Francis’s voice and can imagine what Francis would say to him at an important moment. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent shines as a novel about grief itself, suggesting that in thinking about what we miss, we keep what’s missing alive. Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent opens with a haunting image. In a story William ... Read the full review
SOLECISM by Rosebud Ben-Oni reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke
Rosebud Ben-Oni, reviewed by Kenna O'RourkeSOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 80 pages) It is not difficult to lose patience with the poems of Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Solecism: studded with cultural and personal reference, streets names, and regionalisms – not to mention the grammatical experimentation implicit in a book of poetry – Ben-Oni’s work disorients. The reader clings to disparate stanzas, following ambiguously symbolic sparrows, in a fruitless attempt to add everything up, but the author evades a single style. Ben-Oni traverses her mixed Jewish-Hispanic heritage in sudden turns; just as the reader grows accustomed to colonias and sal si puedes they find themselves in Israel (with side trips back to the States), the parts of the poet divided into cavalier sections. A fragmented poem about Ramadan lives alongside unexpectedly sentimental lines like “and so they fly away / breaking my heart on this cold, cold day” or a sugary ode to the poet’s niece. And Ben-Oni’s eerily suspended language occasionally lapses into indulgent alliteration and even rhyme, troubling an easy conceptual reading and testing the reader’s fortitude: attempting to process more than three such poems in a row generally leads to a sort of inattentive auto-pilot. Were it not for Ben-Oni’s introductory ... Read the full review
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YOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK by Tom Gauld reviewed by Rebecca Dubow
Tom Gauld, reviewed by Rebecca DubowYOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK (Drawn & Quarterly, 180 pages) Tom Gauld’s latest graphic novel, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, is a hundred and eighty pages of cartoons about classic literature in the digital age. Many of these graphics have already appeared in The Guardian, but reading each of them back to back is especially satisfying. Experienced this way, his cartoons argue for a seamless intersection of literary fiction and popular culture. A graphic novel is the ideal medium to accomplish this marriage because it has historically been associated with popular culture. In the past ten years or so, however, great works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have demonstrated the considerable potential of the graphic novel as a literary work. Gauld's graphics are cartoonish and simple, indicating at first that the work would be equally cartoonish and simple, but his irreverent understanding of classic literature is immediately apparent. Although each page contains a different cartoon, the same figures appear repeatedly—Dickens, Shakespeare, and dinosaurs, to name a few. Gauld takes modern storytelling devices and then puts those devices in conversation with classic literature. Dickens becomes a “Dickensmobile”-driving superhero, the ... Read the full review
BOX SCORE by Kevin Varrone reviewed by Anna Strong
BOX SCORE by Kevin Varrone Digital Earthenware, available from iTunes Reviewed by Anna Strong Kevin Varrone’s Box Score: An Autobiography spans across form — from autobiography to history to visual art to the baseball rulebook to the prose poem — content, and reading experience. Presented as a highly interactive free iPad and (by early June 2013) iPhone app, Varrone’s text, which he calls an autobiography, does almost everything in its power to thwart that somewhat restrictive classification. “Box Score” is made of a series of prose poems, each of which invokes Philadelphia history, baseball history (e.g. the first night game ever played between the Phillies and the Reds) Philadelphia baseball, a speaker’s personal recollections (“police your area my dad would say as he smoothed dirt around the first base bag w/ his foot after a bad hop ate me up”), baseball terminology (page 78 is simply a line of a batter’s statistics: g: 1 ab: 0 r: 0 h: 0 2b: 0 3b: 0 hr: 0 avg: .000), found language (Harry Kalas’ famous “outta here” long ball call appears on page 73), and lyrical, evocative images that seem disembodied from — and beautifully juxtapose — the rest of the language ... Read the full review
MISS PLASTIQUE by Lynn Levin reviewed by Michelle Reale
Lynn Levin, reviewed by Michelle RealeMISS PLASTIQUE (Ragged Sky Press, 68 pages) I should have know from the cover of Lynn Levin’s book that I would be able to connect with the poems inside on a very visceral level: that blond doll, with the thick cat eye eyeliner, all blonde and coiffed, with head tipped---yeah, I get it. When I played with my Barbie dolls, they broke rules, they were well-dressed rebels, and they smiled in your face, but plotted their escape behind your back. Lynn Levin writes of a generation here—my generation, her generation, our generation, but her themes are universal, though some of the particulars, some details give a throb to the heart because, well, recognition in any form is a powerful thing. She slips in details you think you may have forgotten about your young life long past, but realize they’ve only been coiled tight inside, waiting to be recalled. Levin writes with a ferocious tenacity, all arterial memory, lust, found power, and raw regret like you imagine a Miss Plastique would be if she were real. The illusion of the “gentle” days of Leave it to Beaver, lettermen, Wally and Eddie Haskell are in the collective ... Read the full review
MOODS by Rachel B. Glaser, reviewed by Kenna O'Rourke
Rachel B. Glaser, reviewed by Kenna O'RourkeMOODS (Factory Hollow Press, 80 pages) MOODS seems innocent enough at first glance: thin and neatly printed, the poems average about two short pages in length, while the cover art – bare-breasted women combing colors from a campfire with hairbrushes – advertises little more than a squishy meditation on divine femininity or the joys of stereotypical womanhood. In a certain sense, Glaser delivers on this front; her poetry is comprised of mystical generalizations about female sexuality, menstruation, and emotion, but the author’s manipulation of these societal tropes is expertly done — they become threatening, subversive. Glaser throws foolish stigma in our faces: and I’m about to get my period maybe I’ll get it now or now Her female subjects are (as they should be) difficult to pin down, at once susceptible to higher powers (God, psychology) and ruthlessly assertive, dominating their male counterparts, as in “Donna and her sister,” where a hapless Sal is driven to admit that “I’m not what you need, I think". The poet attacks (perhaps) commercialized/singular definitions of femininity, evoking Hollywood absurdities in such lines as many women only feel feminine in the water near dolphins or when a saxophone ... Read the full review
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POEMS FOR THE WRITING by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat
Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin, reviewed by Shinelle L. EspaillatPOEMS FOR THE WRITING: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 154 pages) PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS In the poetry workshop, we encourage writers to explore their individual potentials, to experiment, and to eschew valuations of “good” in exchange for measures of success as achieving authorial vision.  The instructor must speak to a wide spectrum of skill.  Valerie Fox’s and Lynn Levin’s new book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, supplies a toolbox for doing just that.  The range of prompts makes the creation of art a more accessible act to a wider audience.  Ultimately, this works as a text for how to teach poetry. The book intermixes the prompts with respect to levels of difficulty and formal elements of the resulting poems.  The first prompt, the paraclausithyron, may appeal to an old world sense of “The Poet,” but introductory workshop students might find both the name and the task somewhat daunting, and are less likely to want to write like Horace, at first.  Indeed, Fox and Levin actually suggest starting workshops with what they call the “get-to-know-you cinquain.” This serves the dual purpose of getting students writing, right away, and introducing formalism to ... Read the full review
MY BEAUTIFUL BUS by Jacques Jouet, translated by Eric Lamb reviewed by Michelle Fost
Jacques Jouet, translated by Eric Lamb, reviewed by Michelle Fost MY BEAUTIFUL BUS (Dalkey Archive Press, 130 pages.) Jacques Jouet’s My Beautiful Bus reminded me of an observation by a former teacher of mine, playwright Romulus Linney. In 2011, a good friend, whom I’d first met many years ago in Linney’s class at the University of Pennsylvania, e-mailed me with the sad news of his death. In his obituary, the New York Times quoted Linney, “My writing will add up to the sum total of me. The choices I make with my writing have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is really your destiny.” Linney was an influential teacher for us young aspiring writers, always telling us to “go deeper” with our writing. Even after death, his words stopped me in my tracks. span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times; font-size: medium;">Reading My Beautiful Bus, I found myself thinking about how a writer creates not just the worlds inside, say, plays and novels, but also—in the act of writing, in the choices of what to think about and attend to and notice, and so on—the world as the writer sees ... Read the full review