Reviews
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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.
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A Smidge of Confusion, A Glow of Fear
Vogelsang is sometimes so restless its hard not to wonder how and when he sleeps, and he makes the reader confront the question of whether sleep, or any kind of ease, is a valid way to spend time.
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Georgia Bottoms
In Mark Childress’s latest novel, Georgia Bottoms, his eponymous heroine is a mash-up of Southern women from popular culture, but that is no reason not to read it.
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Poor Little Poughkeepsie
The affection Joshua Harmon has for Poughkeepsie is the kind one might have for an alcoholic uncle or an abusive neighbor who occasionally tells good stories. The only love here is tough, the product of circumstance rather than choice.
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Halal Pork and Other Stories
Filled with a slew of social critiques and riffs on popular Muslim and American iconography, Cihan Kaan’s first collection of short stories, Halal Pork, is decidedly Muslim-American but also conflicted, negotiating the space between assimilation into American society and the…
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The Bee-Loud Glade
Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade is a rubber-band, stretching from nature to virtual reality and back.
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Leopardi, to the Moon
A concise and erudite presentation of and meditation on the complex and solitary figure of Leopardi, it is also an exploration of the major themes and forms of the poems in Canti—idylls, elegies, dramatic monologues, and history poems, among others—while…
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And Then Lapsed Ordinary
I found myself intrigued by all of the energy surrounding what people seem to be calling a renewed energy in Heaney’s work.