A Sense of Place
Daniel Pyne’s second book A Hole in the Ground Owned By a Liar is a well-told story of the futile attempts we make to escape our overwhelming, modern lives.
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Pratfall into the Infinite
Is Lars Iyer’s new book Dogma a refutation of literature? Or an inevitable confirmation? Regardless, it’s a funny philosophical tale.
A Flower Too Often Smelt Will Wilt
This is a hybrid book that chronicles the real journey and imagines the surreal journey of Lewis and Clark, from watching a baseball game with President Jefferson and Ozzie Smith,…
The Faster I Walk
With a poignant sadness, a young Norwegian writer, Kjersti A. Skomsvold, tells the story of a lonely dying woman in her debut The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am.
Thumbs In, Fingers Splayed
Throughout the collection, the speaker in these poems is constantly aware of this contradiction, the intersection between life and art, perhaps frighteningly so, seeking solace in “these few things left,”…
The Shape-Shifter
In his memoir, God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked, Darrell Hammond tells his story with a remarkable candor that seems designed not to shock or titillate, but to…
Trees Are Blooming Into Bright Lightbulbs
Schomburg’s newest book, Fjords, Vol. 1 holds true to this idea of finding familiarity in a parallel consciousness. Just because the poems often work in a seemingly private dreamscape, doesn’t…
The Whole Vortex of Home
[Peter] Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations.
Before and After
Sitting on the edge of the English language, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s new collection Apricot Jam and Other Stories pushes us into twentieth century Russia.
We’ll Call Them Contact Zones
Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and…
In the Manner of Water or Light
So many of the voices in Ayiti are trapped in situations that are too difficult to bear, and yet they must.