Reviews
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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 over 100,000 people.
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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 individual pieces and as chapters in a developing narrative.
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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.
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Something for Nothing
Set during the ’70s inflation crisis, David Anthony’s first novel, Something for Nothing, is a suspenseful thriller with literary realism. You just may miss your next train stop.
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The Crash Scene of Species Extinction
Everything Roberson writes has an encyclopedic backscope, condensed into impeccable art.
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The Summer Without Men
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel The Summer Without Men traces the summer of Mia Fredrickson, newly divorced and back home in Minnesota surrounded by women, young and old.
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Wanting Light and Buying Hammers
Even the hardest books ultimately cohere, it’s just a matter of whether their internal logic will eventually open up and allow you entrance. Lily Brown’s Rust or Go Missing is such a book.
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Down from Cascom Mountain
Ann Joslin Williams’ first novel, Down from Cascom Mountain, follows troubled young people in an idyllic lodge in New Hampshire for one summer.
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The Octopi and the Flaking Salt
The Grief Performance took me to the edge of an existential black hole, then threw me back on the concrete and said, “Bitch, please. This is theater.”
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When the Stonecutter’s Work is Done
Be warned: Char demands much from his reader. His poetry seems to exist in a limbo, where emotion and intellect meet with startling results. His labyrinthine vision leads the reader into a universe where everything seems transformed.
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Life on Sandpaper
Yoram Kaniuk’s autobiographical novel Life on Sandpaper follows the Israeli writer through his galavanting in 1950s Greenwich Village.
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Monster Party
Lizzy Acker’s first book of stories Monster Party depicts lost adults, drifting into the coming storm.