Zona, by Geoff Dyer
To appreciate Zona, Geoff Dyer’s twelfth book, you’ll need to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky film, Stalker, among the most treasured and troubling movies in the history of cinema. If you’ve…
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Gaze by Christopher Howell
In the opening poem of Christopher Howell’s Gaze, “Home Stretch,” he concludes with, “Receive me. Here are my silver / wings, in accordance with custom. Inside of them / leaves…
Any Day Now, by Terry Bisson
“In this universe the night was falling…” So muses Clayton Bewley, the uprooted Kentuckian at the center of Terry Bisson’s latest novel Any Day Now. It’s a line Clay plucks…
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
“Nothing Elizabeth Ellen has ever written has ever been political, ever.” At least according to the four teenage girls in this vimeo book trailer called “A Brief Bio by Elizabeth…
A Brilliant Button Without Any Cloth
The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.
I Used to be Epic Spittle
It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different…
The Greatest Show
In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of…
Held Together By Sinews
Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.
A History of Potential
In his new history of the experimental writing movement, Oulipo, Many Subtle Channels, Daniel Levin Becker goes where few have gone.
From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel throws us into a complex world of a young Filipino immigrant who is unexpectedly detained by Homeland Security.
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon
I found this text to be profound, relentless, frustrating, inspiring, demanding, silly, pompous, elastic, and mind-expanding. That is what poetry is for, and this is for poetry.
This is Real
With dream-like language, Miranda Mellis’s latest book, None of This is Real, gives us a fantastical world with a haunting resemblance to our own.