Reviews
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Our Conversations Cold-Pressed
Danielle Cadena Deulen has assembled a collection that deftly maneuvers through dew-formed natural worlds, myths, and histories gone wrong to create a poetry collection that I found hypnotic and, at times, laced with violence and impending doom.
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Rubbish and Blazing Light
Set in contemporary Mumbai, Aravind Adiga’s second novel, Last Man in Tower, focuses on Yogesh Murthy, the man who wants nothing, and the community who doesn’t understand him.
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A Toast to Finitude
In The Postmortal, first-time novelist Drew Magary shows us a world where humans no longer age—with the goal, it seems, of making us grateful that we do.
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Poetry Can Save Us
The Trouble Ball witnesses the darker parts of history and celebrates resistance to the forces that created those.
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The Children of At Risk
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Amina Gautier’s At-Risk tells the stories of teenagers who, for many reasons, are at risk.
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Army Cats by Tom Sleigh
This collection has made me want to slink myself, like a cat, into literature, rub up against history and relish its connection to human curiosity.
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A Tall Tale Too True
Set in the 1840s Midwest, Kris Saknussemm’s second novel, Enigmatic Pilot, delivers unexpected characters in a surreal interpretation of American history.
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If Hemingway Were a Poet
In poet Ben Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, we follow expat Adam Gordon as he travels Spain managing the boundaries between art and life.
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Return to the Year Broken Free
I wish I could explain to you, to myself, the effect this language has upon me, but I can only say it makes my skin crawl. In a good way.
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The Gifts of the Blarney Stone
Sebastain Barry’s latest novel, On Canaan’s Side, follows aging Lilly Bere as she crosses the Atlantic to America and slowly watches everyone around her die.
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You Mean Garden, Don’t You?
The collection’s last section, “The Two Thousandsies” (dedicated to Rachel Maddow), his “Garden of Eden” reminds us this Professor Emeritus poet has managed to sustain over decades a vision of the profane as sacred, which alone is worth the price…
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Growing Out of It
A descendant of Cheever, Stuart Nadler traces evolving relationships with delicate, precise prose in his debut short story collection, The Book of Life.