Reviews
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Little Century, by Anna Keesey
With her debut novel Little Century, Anna Keesey finds herself among other admirable writers with the hard-won title of late-blooming author.
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Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate
The good news about Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate, is that though it is a re-imagination of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” from his Canterbury Tales, you don’t have to have been an English major or a Chaucer lover to appreciate…
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Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book.
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The Prisoner of Heaven, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The latest novel by Spanish writer Carloz Ruiz Zafón opens on a cold winter’s day in Barcelona. Business is abysmal at Sempre & Sons bookshop. The Sempre family’s loquacious friend, Fermín Romero de Torres, offers to parade in his underwear…
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Partyknife by Dan Magers
When James Wright said, “I have wasted my life,” Dan Magers must haven taken it to heart.
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The Watery Part of the World, by Michael Parker
Michael Parker’s The Watery Part of the World opens two-hundred years ago on the shores of Nag’s Head, North Carolina, a sandbank notorious for pirates who once lured ships onto the shoals for the usual rape-and-plunder reasons. Such an attack…
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Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, by Jose Saramago
Initially published in Portugal in 1976, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is one of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s first novels. He was fifty-four when he wrote it, and had spent most of life, as our translator Giovanni Pontiero puts…
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Scared Text by Eric Baus
A metamorphosis occurs among the prose poems of Eric Baus’ collection, Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. We are the audience, the spectators, but also part of the scene as we remember change in our own lives…
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Jonah Man, by Christopher Narozny
On the surface, Christopher Narozny’s Jonah Man screams masculinity. There’s mystery, of course, and, crime, drugs, and all-too-familiar feminine archetypes. It could easily have been just another well-written book of genre-fiction; what makes it shine is its beguiling world.
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Advice for Lovers by Julian Talamantez Brolaski
“A rose is arrows is eros,” as one poem has it, and who is to argue? Love and lyricism are all the better for their queerness. Brolaski, with a powerfully trans poetic, instructs us on just this fact, cloying power…
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Inside by Alix Ohlin
At some point in Inside, Alix Ohlin’s elegant second novel, you will probably notice, as I did toward the end, that her characters have a lot of sex. I mean a LOT of sex.
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The Walk by Robert Walser
Robert Walser’s legendary novella Der Spaziergang (The Walk), the first work of his to appear in English and the only one to be translated during his lifetime, is now available in the revised version he published three years after the…