Reviews
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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.
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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…