ECHO NORTH by Joanna Ruth Meyer Page Street Publishing Company, 394 pages reviewed by Rachel Hertzberg Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver 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. Hoping to pay off the debts that his new wife has incurred, Echo’s father journeys to the city. In his absence, Echo’s situation at home becomes unbearable and she flees to the woods. There, Echo stumbles upon her father, not lost in the city after all, but terribly wounded. As Echo rushes to his side, a wolf appears in the forest clearing—the same beast that scarred Echo’s face years earlier. The wolf promises to heal Echo’s father for a price: Echo must stay with the wolf for one year in his house under the mountain. Upon agreeing, Echo soon learns that the wolf is as much a prisoner as she is. He is confined in the house, and ...

EDIBLE FLOWERS by Lucia Chericiu Main Street Rag, 62 pages 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. The poems of Edible Flowers are largely occupied with how both the material and the lingual in people’s lives come with human stories ingrained in their meanings and purposes. In these poems, and in the reality they came from, all objects and words betray a time and a place and a person. A tree grown in a drought means a neighbor has stolen water, an old women’s hands aren’t merely tools but things which “bespoke hours and years she toiled,” and the propaganda people are forced to memorize is made ...

EDIE (WHISPERING): POEMS FROM GREY GARDENS by Sarah Nichols Dancing Girl Press, 19 pages 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. Why must Edie whisper? Which Edie speaks? The ...

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 ...

ELEANOR, OR THE REJECTION OF THE PROGRESS OF LOVE by Anna Moschovakis Coffee House Press, 208 pages 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. Simultaneously a character study and a self-reflective piece about the labor of composition and revision, the novel effectively incorporates a mise en abyme structure without letting meta-textual trappings take away from the urgency and reality of its many compelling moments. “[T]here’s a massive question mark at the heart of the novel,” the author told Bomb Magazine in a recent interview. “And at the end it’s still a question, but it’s maybe, I don’t know, set in a better font.” By never, in fact, relinquishing the question mark, the novel places itself firmly within the chaos of this violent world, confronting its irresolvable quandaries attentively so as to more deeply probe their effects on our collective consciousness. So who ...

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 ...

EMPTY WORDS by Mario Levrero translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott Coffee House Press, 122 pages reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver Mario Levrero’s Empty Words is no ordinary novel. 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. At first blush, however, Empty Words appears to be an unusual work to translate because it is ostensibly less of a narrative and more of a meditation on language itself. After all, it is structured as a series of handwriting exercises. But it becomes clear rather quickly that translation does not hinder the reader’s ability to appreciate Empty Words because that meditation on language and the shape of individual words creates a narrative of its own. Words do not exist in a vacuum, and the narrator’s efforts at ...

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 ...

ENIGMAS by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz translated by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal Ugly Duckling Presse, 25 pages 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 ...

Ken Kalfus, reviewed by Chris Ludovici
EQUILATERAL (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 ...

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 time ...

EVERYDAY MADNESS: On Grief, Anger, and Love by Lisa Appignanesi 4th Estate, 261 pages 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. The first section of the memoir, on grieving her late husband John, is already startling in its blunt reality: his last words to her, which I will not include here, are far from kind. Already here, however, the reader finds something different from the narrative that might be expected: “this is not a romantic tale,” she writes. Although we see a slow healing, what is presented here and what interests her most is a close examination of the taboo moments of anger and unmooring so bound up in grief. This is a book of ideas almost masquerading as a memoir. Appignanesi is a writer acutely interested in psychoanalysis and literature, swiftly bringing both Freud and Hamlet to bear on her own story and toward thinking about the role of the widow. If this were all ...

EXPOSURE by Katy Resch George Kore Press, 168 pages reviewed by Rebecca Entel 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. Exposure begins with the title piece, a short-short story that introduces us to both intimacy and estrangement. Like most of the other short-short stories in the collection, we don’t learn the characters’ names, and the writing achieves tension in how it pulls us in and holds us back. This is form and theme, both. In the short-short (three pages) “Exposure,” a removed third-person narrator takes us through a quick chain of associations. The ...

FAMILY LEXICON by Natalia Ginzburg translated by Jenny McPhee New York Review Books, 224 Pages reviewed by Robert Sorrell Right before falling asleep, my father becomes totally incoherent. If you speak to him, he will respond with words, they just won’t make any sense. Neither will he have any memory of your conversation. (He passed this trait on to me; often to my detriment, I employ it regularly.) Once, when my dad had floated off into this near-unconscious state, he started talking about the Secret Service. From that point on, to spout these nocturnal babblings has become known in my family as “Secret Servicing.” Families, social groups, and even workplaces often have phrases and words just like these. “Inside jokes” is a common term for some of them, but not all fall neatly into this category. For many of these words and phrases, a new definition or usage, with nuance beyond the punchline, has been created for a small group of people. This idea is the cornerstone of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. 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, ...

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 ...

FAREWELL, AYLIS: A NON-TRADITIONAL NOVEL IN THREE WORKS by Akram Aylisli translated by Katherine E. Young Academic Studies Press, 316 pages 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. The publication of Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Parts, by Academic Studies Press in November 2018, addresses these gaps in our literary exposure in several ways. For the first time we have Aylisli’s powerful and Nobel-worthy novel in English (he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2014). Because Farewell, Aylis depicts ethnic violence against Armenians in Azerbaijan in the 1990s, Aylisli has been the target of censorship ...

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, ...

FINGERPRINTS OF PREVIOUS OWNERS by Rebecca Entel The Unnamed Press, 209 pages 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. She begins with Myrna Burre. Entel endorses Myrna’s authority by locating the story’s point of view in this islander who’d “never arrived here from anywhere.” When we meet her in the novel’s opening lines, she and the other “A-Y-S” staff (At Your Service, pronounced “eeeeyes”) are gathered on the beach, wearing white sheets over their uniforms, to perform a compulsory pantomime of a native welcoming ceremony for tourists who are aboard a boat named, with casual tactlessness, The Pinta. (Their baggage is brought by The Nina.) “A team of people with ...

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 ...

FLOWER WARS by Nico Amador Newfound, 35 pages reviewed by Claire Oleson Like a scene is set to music, a vision of the body is set to language in Nico Amador’s poetry collection Flower Wars. In this book, biology is boiled into word, punctuation, metaphor, and syllable, leaving the reader’s understanding of physicality and the human inhabitance of flesh up to a new breed of interpretation— that of one on the page. Moving between prose poems and lineated pieces, Amador addresses hair, gender, Pablo Neruda, shifting personal identities, hummingbirds, and so much more as a central narrative through-line begins to surface between stanzas. The opening poem of Flower Wars, “Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair,” borrows its title from a Frida Kahlo painting and begins with the statement “There is the dream of exposure and then there is the act of it—” immediately drawing a boundary between rumination and action and perhaps also putting the poem itself, as a form that works an invitation to thought, into question. The reader, if familiar with Kahlo’s painting, can call to mind the image of Frida in a suit and bearing a short, traditionally masculine-coded haircut. The image and the painting are stationary, ...

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 ...

FORTUNE'S FATE by Miriam Graham Unreal Imprints, 1075  pages reviewed by Flair Coody Roster 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. Although my therapist has since reassured me several times that Graham did not deliberately ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. The unnamed narrator of Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea is, like David, the consummate gardener. The years spent caring for his garden have imparted upon this narrator a unique understanding of time’s most closely-guarded secret: that it will always pass, without regard for the humans that attempt to confine it. He explains ...

GASLIGHT: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century by Joachim Kalka translated by Isabel Fargo Cole New York Review Books, 233 pages reviewed by Katharine Coldiron Purchase this book to benefit Cleaver 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. The specialization is the rub. Few of the essays in this book are likely to be suitable for a reader without a preexisting interest in the essay’s subject matter. For example, this reviewer has particular interest in Richard Wagner and Marcel Proust, and so I found the essays ...

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 ...

GODS ON THE LAM by Christopher David Rosales Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 302 pages 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. Gods on the Lam opens with a man named Wayne waking up alongside an Arizona highway in a ’70 Chevy that he’s “somewhat sure” belongs to him. He’s only halfway confident that the truck is his because he has no memory. To get a sense of what’s going on Wayne drives to the nearby town of Show Low, where he encounters Ruby, a mother on a decade-long search for her missing son. Believing that the answers to their questions may be linked, Wayne and Ruby team up and stumble upon a string of bizarre (possibly alien) abductions that have been afflicting the area, disappearances that have come to be known locally as the Burials. As the cover art perfectly suggests, Gods ...

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GOING DARK by Dennis Must Coffeetown Press, 167 pages 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. The characters in this collection have done everything from acting to working the night shift in a college town’s only hotel to working as a night watchman in the local steel mill. They seem to be reflections on Must himself, who has co-founded a commercial real estate firm, taught school, worked as a cabinetmaker, short-order cook, lightning rod installer, florist, ...

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 ...

GOLDEN DELICIOUS by Christopher Boucher Melville House Publishing, 323 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The best experimental fiction challenges the reader to think and feel in new kinds of ways but also invites her along for the journey. Christopher Boucher’s second novel, Golden Delicious, delivers partially on this promise. However, it reads like a literary experiment, more mathematical than artistic. Is it enjoyable? I can’t tell. Am I supposed to like it? I flipped the pages, thinking of David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram.” Persistent irony is tiresome, he says. “Sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow … oppressed.” Although I didn’t feel carved out, I did feel oppressed by the sheer volume of surreal cleverness in Golden Delicious. As I dug in, I experienced the unsettling sensation of reading a book that is smarter than I am. 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 ...

GOOD ON PAPER by Rachel Cantor Melville House, 320 pages 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 ...

GRAND UNION by Zadie Smith Penguin Press, 256 pages reviewed by Eliza Browning Since the release of her enormously successful first novel White Teeth in 2000, Zadie Smith has regularly published novels and essay collections, including last year’s acclaimed Feel Free. 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. Form is experimented with, even scrapped altogether. “Mood” collages fragments of ruminations on modernity, including imitations of Tumblr posts. “Parents’ Morning Epiphany” is an analysis of a child’s homework. What ties these stories together is not subject or theme, but Smith’s witty, thoughtful, and culturally attuned voice. Politics hover in the background of many of the stories, although their references are typically oblique rather than overt. Rather than tackle the major issues head-on—Brexit, Trump’s America—they quietly remind you now and again of the world we live in. In “The Lazy River,” British vacationers seeking escape ...

GREEN TARGET by Tina Barr Barrow Street Press, 82 pages reviewed by Jeff Klebauskas  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. Barr introduces us to her unique vision right off the bat in “Tick Tock Tank” where she unveils an invisible-to-the-naked-eye network linking a brutal car accident, the great American thoroughbred racehorse Secretariat, Panzer tanks still embedded in the forests of Normandy, and a Luna moth resting on the top-end of her walking stick. This last image sets the tone for the rest of Green Target as one can envision Barr strolling through the thickets of civilization, her path illuminated by an embodiment of nature crowning her stick. Barr ...

GUYS LIKE ME by Dominique Fabre translated by Howard Curtis New Vessel Press, 144 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Sometime during Christmas week, 1997, my wife Rona and I and two of our friends were eating dinner in a small restaurant near St. Paul, in Paris. It must have been on rue Charlemagne, but though I can recall the table and the intimate ambiance, I don’t remember the name. We had finished eating, probably we were having our coffee, when the waiter advised us to forget about our experience. This isn’t the real Paris, he said, in the pointed French way. Of course, we understood, the center of Paris is full of tourists; and here we were only a few blocks from the Île de Saint-Louis, one of the fussiest parts of the city. The machinery of global capital, whose power has only heightened in the last two decades, has a way of obliterating the essence of place. Wealth, and all its concomitant pretensions, transforms the commotion of urban life into a commodity. But on the other hand, wasn’t this a rather under-nuanced notion? Authenticity is a slippery creature. When he returned to collect our money, the waiter told us ...

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 ...

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 ...

Donald Quist's short story "Takeaway" appears in Issue No. 12 of Cleaver.  HARBORS by Donald Quist Awst Press, 136 pages reviewed by Benjamin Woodard 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. I write as a person born with automatic privilege based first on my birth gender and skin pigment, and second on my middle class New England upbringing. But mostly, I write as a person dissatisfied with these inherited social constructs, of the prejudice fed to so many from their first breaths, and as someone who is so incredibly grateful for authors like Donald Quist, who parse these fears and frustrations through eloquent prose. There may not be an immediate solution to bring the nation together, but within Quist’s writing, empathy and forgiveness thrive alongside disappointment, offering us all the chance ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

HEMMING FLAMES by Patricia Colleen Murphy Utah Sate University Press, 78 pages 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. In the collection’s opening poem “Losing Our Milk Teeth,” the speaker details how their father “will be all/ smiles. He’ll say pass the mother/ fucking peas.” These lines are at once foreboding and strangely funny; in a scene where the mother is not wholly present, a request for her return is tucked into an expressed desire for peas, all barbed with an impatience and anger which suggests familiarity coexisting with aggression. As in the opening poem of Hemming Flames, many of the poems to follow also ...

HER BODIES AND OTHER PARTIES by Carmen Maria Machado Graywolf Press, 245 pages 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. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, and current Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, Carmen Maria Machado has a deft hand at spinning culturally relative, purpose-driven narrative. Into each short story she’s woven elements of pop culture, feminist social criticism, literary fiction, and magical realism, varying each in measure. Threads of influence from authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, ...

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 ...

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 ...

HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD edited by Kelly Jensen Algonquin Young Readers, 218 pages 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. “The people and the world around us shape our individual path to feminism…The journey is always changing, always shifting, and influenced by our own experiences and perspectives.” The book is structured like a scrapbook, having a combination of calligraphy, designs, and doodles drawn across the pages, accenting each chapter. Not only is this visually appealing, it creates a sense of comfort that softens the intensity of the subject matter. Through its playful design ...

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 ...

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 ...

HOLLOW HEART by Viola Di Grado, translated by Antony Shugaar Europa Editions, 174 pages 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. Dorotea’s messages to other dead people, which read as though she were posting something on an alternate Facebook for the other side, are telling manifestations of these powers of invention. “Hi, I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986-2011),” reads one of the messages, in part “We went to elementary school together. I was the one with freckles…I know we haven’t seen each other in 18 years but I heard that you were killed last year in a moped accident. Well, I happen to be in your neighborhood—I’m dead, too—and I was just thinking that if you had any free time, ...