Reviews
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A Children’s Waltz
A collaboration between novelist Jessica Anthony and designer Rodrigo Corral yields a novel that makes our hearts move faster than our brains.
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Weird Novels by Lady Novelists
In her novel Angel, Elizabeth Taylor turns the exploration of the relationship of the artist to her imagination, her drive, her self-opinion, her ego, on its ear.
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Drinking a Glass of Light
The emotional theme of the volume, the nostalgia and death that is announced in the book’s title and reaffirmed in almost every poem to some extent, is what I know I will carry with me for a long time.
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Monstress
Lysley Tenorio’s linked short story collection, Monstress, organically ties together stories of the misfits and outcasts of both the Philippines and Southern California.
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Wind and Rain Make No Difference
Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of…
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Cold-Blooded and Bothered
Ellen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound.
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The New Gilded Class
Christina Alger’s debut The Darlings follows the Darling family headed by a billionaire financier through the financial crisis. Luckily, these rich people are really screwed up.
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A Square Grows Gloomy
Especially for a reader coming to Trakl for the first time, Firmage’s accessible introduction and organization of the poems provide an excellent overview of Trakl’s development as a poet and the range of work he produced.
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What You Lost Is What Everyone Lost
Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.
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Want No More
In a complex story about two anitpodal women, Deborah Scroggins delivers answers in Wanted Women: Faith, Lies & the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui.
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Thorns In Our Hair, But Never a Shroud
Used well, the collective perspective affords the poet a wider voice, a surer sense. The reader feels present in these moments of ruin, trusting even the more fantastical occurrences.
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Lost in Space
Both rhetorically playful and plot driven, Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Men in Space, now out in the U.S., floats in between his other novels Remainder and C.