Reviews
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By Any Other Name
Like Freedom, Keith Scribner’s third book, The Oregon Experiment, is hugely ambitious, decidedly modern, distinctly American novel, with complicated family dynamics, and remarkable depth of character and psychological nuance.
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Their Eyes Like Geodes
In She Returns to the Floating World, Gailey utilizes anime and other aspects of Japanese culture, such as its folklore and attitudes following The Bomb, as she puzzles through how to define “she.”
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Populist Fatalism
In his new epistolary novel, Dignity, about a new community founded in the unpaved cul-de-sacs and abandoned unfinished houses of the California desert, Ken Layne criticizes the material obsessions of contemporary capitalism.
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A Box, or Paradox, A Language Game
Tesser’s chapbook slips outside certainties, authorities, controls, leaving her reader-players loose to enact their own language game, re-encountering the inherent antic plasticity of words and meanings.
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The Eyes of Ginger Pritt
The first novel from poet Rebecca Wolff, The Beginners is a coming-of-age tale told in riveting prose.
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Whisk in the Mouth
Editor’s Note: We don’t usually run reviews that are conversations between two writers, and we don’t usually run reviews on Saturday, so you’re getting a doubly special treat today. Here are Hilary Plum and Zach Savich discussing Filip Marinovich’s And…
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The Chipped Mosaic, The Dust
As a poet, [Joanne] Diaz trusts her readers to understand; she conveys the electric, what we feel and are jolted by, but cannot ever fully grasp in words or phrases.
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Fables
Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision, the stories of Sarah Goldstein’s collection, Fables, awaken the tension between human and nonhuman in these haunting vignettes.
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Even More Taboo Than Love
C. Dale Young uses this third book to address injustices, the divisions caused by pain, prejudice, and a fractured spirit.
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Radiance
In Louis B. Jones’s new novel Radiance, Mark Perdue, a mildly depressed astrophysicist with Lyme disease, takes his daughter to L.A. for a weekend.
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Like Algae on the Surface of Grace
There is a feeling of complicity in his [Dlugos’s] best poems in that he makes the reader love the burnished, tumultuous late nights and affection for those around him.