Reviews
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What Do You Deserve?
Alexander Maksik’s debut novel You Deserve Nothing reshapes an old story—predatory teacher and young student.
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No Touching of Girls
Gawker contributor and New York Post reporter, Shelia McClears tells of working at the Times Square peepshows in her new book, The Last of the Live Nude Girls.
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It’s Just My Books I’m Burning!
Djordjevic’s rhythms provide a strong scaffolding throughout this powerful, necessary volume. In Oranges and Snow we have an outstanding example of the literary enterprise.
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One of Us Is Already Gone
[York] never sinks into oblique facts, but he does not forget them, either. He never ignores the simple truth that he is writing poetry, and crafts a collection that is moving and substantial.
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The Personal is Political
Narrated by young Nuri, Hisham Matar’s second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, tells of a father abducted by a corrupt regime—a story that closely resembles Matar’s own life.
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Baffled, Bursting, and Barely Contained
A collection of flash fiction from five authors, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves unites distinct, compelling voices into one bursting collection.
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The Dead Man’s Back Arches
The collection works as poetic biography and Whitmanesque dialogue, and this approach and its repetitions become irresistibly hypnotic.
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Wings Wands Stars Tulle
These poems have all the instinct and fangs of a canine, and the plush, electric fur of a wolf: the intensity and sheer quality of workmanship in the poems is impressive.
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The Moon Rises
Glen Duncan’s new novel The Last Werewolf is sophisticated and horrifying and elegant and not for Young Adult readers, who would need a thesaurus, a history tutor and sedation.
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To the Language of Doves
Darwish’s identity (and the Palestinian identity) has been, at least partly, developed in exile. Darwish writes: “I am absence./ The heavenly and the expelled.” Here he speaks not only for himself, but for his people.
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Emerging Empathy
In The Chairs Are Where the People Go, Shelia Heti and Misha Glouberman explore all topics that Glouberman cares about, including feeling like a fraud, seeing John Zorn play Cobra, and asking a good question.
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Slashed Narcissi, Drilled Stone
In physics terms, the poetry world is underground “all the way down,” so Influence lurks in each sea cave like a bastard eel, recharging in darkness, awaiting his next dinner with flickering impatience and slaverous hunger.