Reviews
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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.
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The Measure of a Moneyless Man
In Mark Sundeen’s latest book, The Man Who Quit Money, we meet Daniel Suelo, a man who has chosen to live a radically austere life.
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selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee
When Boyle is insightful, this style allows the brilliance of the insight to shine through unfiltered and unaided by the mechanisms of literature and poetry, sometimes with powerful effect.
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God’s Geese Go To Pond
Now, with the Wave Books release of Aygi’s poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Valentine, audiences worldwide are able to celebrate Aygi among his Russian contemporaries.
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Tiny Words vs. The Robot
With [C.] An MLP Stamp Stories Anthology, Mud Luscious Press conducts an experiment in the limits of form: magnificent stories the size of stamps.