Anxiety Bombs
In her debut novel, Threats, Amelia Gray is coy about plot in deference to the beauty and urgency of people’s thoughts.
Reviews
2621 posts
Plenty Worth Saying, With Very Few Words
Kevin Moffett’s Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is one of the most delightful collections in recent memory.
Met a Lunatic on Craigslist
But even here, vertigo and ambivalence dominate, and I find myself searching the poems for the kinetic energy of a walker in the city; heel marks and muddy droplets. I…
Modern Retellings
The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Death Comes to Pemberly both attempt to pay homage to nineteenth century novelists, but the translation is not always apt.
If I Squint, I See Them Clearly
With its host of defunct genomes, a rupturing cosmos, malevolent gods, a derelict body politic, and endless war, the poems in this collection act as harbingers of the wasteland America…
The Map and the Territory
The latest novel from infant terrible Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory sits in his oeuvre as a less-cruel, poignant romp through familiar themes.
The Vanishers
Heidi Julavits’ latest novel The Vanishers is provocative and full of hefty, even academic ideas—at its best, a nouveau feminist manifesto.
The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry
It is clear from Dove’s introduction to the anthology, and from her selections, that she just wanted an engaging, informative, high -quality collection. She succeeded.
An Inverted World of Trees and Trembling Sky
At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take…
What We Become
Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.
Fictional Pointillism
Tupelo Hassman’s debut Girlchild is an emotionally rich and complex picture of a smart girl brutalized and circumscribed by circumstances.
Tell Me She Is Happy With Her Life
In this collection, Chaple successfully fuses the personal with the spatial. As a result, an awareness of the way poems, by airing out the rooms of stanzas, can provide at…