Reviews
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Competing Impulses: Blake Butler’s Molly
“Should I be allowed to make this said? To bring to light a part of Molly’s story she covered over at any cost?”
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Coming-of-age into Fame: Ben Fama’s If I Close My Eyes
Masterful prose…a novel that takes an unflinching view of what some might do for fame and ratings.
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The Circumstance of Expectancy: Sara Gallardo’s January
From the early pages of the novel, she laments, “It’s a different story for rich girls, they have their ways,” which is a very elegant way of throwing one’s arms up and shouting that it isn’t fair to a world…
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A Mortal Education: Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions
In one of Solomon’s early lessons, he pushes Archy toward thoughts of his own mortality for the first time before offering religion as a solution to existential dread.
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“Good Buy” to All That: Pip Adam’s The New Animals
It’s imaginative fiction in a way that is jolting to the auto-fiction that is so prevalent today, and it allows Adam to make commentary on the disasters of human ambition.
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Organic Sins: Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming
Have we made contact with the Leipzig of the late ’80s and early ’90s? Have we made contact with THAT German?
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Identifying a Mixed Flock: Dimitri Reyes’s Papi Pichón
Such multistoried, woven-together heritage justifies and perhaps even demands the necessity of different ways to tell an origin story.
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Against Aesthetic Beauty: Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters
. . . Elkin revisits works and experiences new ones, generating dialogues between them and their artists.
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In the Details: Don DeLillo’s Library of America volumes
In 1979, at the age of forty-two, the distinctly American writer Don DeLillo made a change that would have a profound impact on his work: he left the United States. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that year —his first accolade after…
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Gender Interrogations in Contemporary Queer Poetics: Six New Poetry Collections
How is poetic form being adapted, altered, and reimagined in contemporary lesbian and queer poetry? Five new poetry collections by lesbian, queer, and trans poets attend keenly to gender and systems surrounding it.
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In the Wilds of Magic: Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark
Despite the challenges presented by this novel’s wandering nature, Lispector’s stylistic feats enchants through to the end, and offers a compelling perspective on the wild magic of her voice.
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The Anger of Memory: Teju Cole’s Tremor
In this, Cole has taken the “tragedy” of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel.