Reviews
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I am a Japanese Writer
With wit and insight, Dany Laferriere, the Haitian-Canadian novelist, explores national identity and cultural authenticity in his latest book, I Am a Japanese Writer.
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No Trace of Origin, No Thorn
The poems in Copperhead use the deeply wrought questions with which it is concerned to wisely come up with a sort of memoir, which is attaching deeply felt memories with deeply felt language, thus making it literature.
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New Rituals for Curbside Healing
The poems in Signs And Wonders have a moral and structural grace that is sometimes fueled by political anger or collective sorrow.
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Ivan and Misha
Michael Alenyikov’s award-winning new book, Ivan and Misha, explores many-faceted love—from the intense and fleeting to bonds of familial obligation.
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In Zanesville
With the precise and true texture of ordinary experience, Jo Ann Beard’s new novel, In Zanesville, follows an unnamed narrator through her adolescence.
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Disorientation, Disgust, and Killing flies
Michael Dickman’s poems inhabit a place in which “morning makes its way up the street as a loose pack of wild dogs” and we find ourselves—through his sharp pronoun use—feeling complicit in acts of violence that are committed in a…
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There’s Coffee On My Shirt, Not Blood
Seemingly masked in the two words of the title (Ghost this, Machine that), Ben Mirov has written an intimate, if cryptic, book of poetry.
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Growing Pains in Retrospect
In her new novel, The Adults, Alison Espach tells the story of one girl carefully stepping over that unbridgeable gap between childhood and adulthood, and nearly falling to pieces in the process.
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His Forked Voice Licked My Mortal Ears Clean
In The Flight Cage, Rebecca Dunham adopts and manipulates the personas of historical, usually literary, women to explore the various confinements and resistances that they—and by extension, all women—endure.
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Temporary Shelter
Weston Cutter’s debut collection, You’d Be a Stranger, Too, delivers the magical click of excellent fiction.
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Rambling Toward Understanding
Editor’s Note: This is not a typical review, but I think it captures the challenge of reviewing, and it delves deeply into the book it is examining.
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The Millionaire Thing
Shady short sales, insider trading, and SEC violations form the moral dilemmas of this debut novel, set against the remote landscape of Bolivia.