Reviews
-
“The Polish Boxer,” by Eduardo Halfon
Eduardo Halfon is unsatisfied with something. So he decides to travel (or escape?) in attempt to discover what’s missing. His novel The Polish Boxer is a murky study on the influence of geography on a person’s desires.
-
“The Children” by Paula Bohince
The plosive thrills and quietly mournful tenor of the finely-wrought poems Paula Bohince’s The Children (her second full-length collection) reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads. This collection reminds the reader that lyric’s static and…
-
“Stories for Boys,” by Gregory Martin
Stories for Boys is Gregory Martin’s second memoir to examine the landscape of family. His first, Mountain City, maps his ties to a one-blink town in rural Nevada: the book is steady, spare, and clear-eyed. But the focus of this new…
-
Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino
Ryan Teitman reviews Safe as Houses by Marie-Helen Bertino today in Rumpus Books.
-
“The Fact of the Matter” by Sally Keith
In The Fact of the Matter, moments are artifacts to be labeled and sorted. The poems are not an attempt to make sense – of time, of history, and of the self and the self in and out of love…
-
Love, In Theory by E. J. Levy
The protagonists in the nine stories that make up E.J. Levy’s Love, In Theory (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction) are almost all highly educated, the sort of people who quote Adorno to themselves during times of…
-
“The Crossed Out Swastika” by Cyrus Cassells
Cyrus Cassells’ fifth collection of poems, The Crossed-Out Swastika, treads the familiar yet treacherous and muddy ground of World War II. For a less skilful poet, such hostile territory may have presented an insurmountable challenge. For Cassells’, however, the atrocities…
-
NW by Zadie Smith
The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. This is how Zadie Smith opens her latest novel, NW, and how appropriate–that something so fiery and core-hot, so screaming and universal could appear dumbfounded, loafing, stagnant. Meet North West London, a…
-
The Invisibles by Hugh Sheehy
“Maybe, if you knew nothing about me, I could sit right next to you, and you would never have known it,” says Cynthia, the seventeen-year-old narrator of the title story in Hugh Sheehy’s debut collection, The Invisibles.
-
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis
Because approaching a lake is a strange thing, especially in the opening pages. Small detours abound.
-
The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, by Adam Prince
The eleven stories in Adam Prince’s debut collection, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, feel lived rather than written. Like stories told by strangers in bars when you’re both drunk, their core tragedies and ironies achieve a casual, understated universality.…
-
“In Time’s Rift” by Ernst Meister
In Heidegger’s essay ‘The Nature of Language’ he poses the question “When does language speak itself as language?” He answers: “Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages…