The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Perhaps the glue of cruelty’s hold is not its “art” but its performance, its visceral slap, its full-frontal assault.
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The Unforgiving Cinderblock
Dunn doesn’t do dazzle, though he duly honors those whose large, obsessive stars have burned brightly.
Would You Do That Again?
In short, the book offers the expert work of an expert: it is as if Bly is writing messages against the sky using not a plane but his own flawless…
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1, charts the expansive career of an experimental science fiction writer.
After the Umpteenth Bird
The speaker of The Trees Around navigates the empty spaces on the page with as much deftness and resilience as he does the empty spaces in our universe (perceptual and…
Instead of Words…Blew Cinders
Page by page, and bit by bit, the story of these poems becomes part of a warm current of emotion in a greater ocean of loss.
Ladies and Gentlemen
The brief unresolved narratives of Adam Ross’s new short story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, show regular people with compelling problems.
Set the Dumpster On Fire
What Gottlieb reveals to us in this collection, is that the key to survival is the same animal desire that served as our undoing in the first place, but the…
No Bad News for the King
In No Bad News for the King, Emma Larkin (a pseudonym for an American journalist in Asia) untangles the convoluted story of contemporary Burma and the 2008 cyclone that killed…
Your Emptiness Has an Aqueduct In It
The Last Usable Hour might be one of our truest examples of serial poetry. Each of the book’s four sequences, and each of the poems that comprise them, stand as…
His Nose Still Mine
The reflective and observant nature of the speaker creates a sense of subtle wisdom that clips [Shane] McCrae’s signature, disruptive syntax.