Reviews
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Blizzard Over Bosphorous
A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities.
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Nowhere Ho!
Shalom Auslander’s first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, reminds us that the world is a horrible, sad place, but luckily it’s damn funny, too.
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A Different American Dream
In Sam Benjamin’s debut memoir, American Gangbang, we follow an aspiring porn director as he finds what he’s looking for–and what he’s not.
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A Sunny Day is a Sufficient Cathedral
The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation.
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The Queer Zoo
Shannon Cain’s short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, offers a refreshingly agnostic and all-embracing perspective on sexual desire and identity.
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Synapses Erupt Like Sparrows
In Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure.
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The Drugs Do Work
Strange, surreal and occasionally macabre, the new short-fiction anthology The Speed Chronicles offers a primer on a class of illicit substances—and a category of human experience—at once painful and joyous.
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Fitzgerald’s Lost Road Trip
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long-lost account, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, follows Zelda and Scott on an eventful road trip in the 1920s.
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The Garden, Disseminated, Overgrown
Out of reverence for the body’s irreducibility, Mort’s keeps strictly close to the phenomenal world, thereby freeing her imagination to honor all the body’s modes: five-fold sensuality, hunger as well as lust, youth and aging, selfishness and tender community.
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Their Faces Blur in Every Mirror
Darling writes with incredible crispness, but the world she describes remains cold, stark, upper-class, and difficult to relate to.
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These Veins of Leaf, Hand, Storm and Stream
Ideally, critics and teachers are humbled by their vocations and the artistry the vocations expose them to, encouraging effort to stay fresh , emotionally resonant and intellectually worthwhile. Say yes to all of the above when the subject is Di…
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Somewhere Below the Solar Plexus of Her
What does it take for a person to kill a living thing, then a human being? Why are the truths of war silenced?