Reviews
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Why They Cried
These stories by Jim Hanas are about something important: how much suffering arises in the gap between our public identities and whatever kernel of self is left inside.
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The Marriage Artist
In Andrew Winer’s insightful novel, an art critic struggles with his wife’s infidelity and suicide, and a painter deals with life in Hitler’s concentration camp by creating Jewish marriage contracts.
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10 Mississippi
This book is seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is… as flowing and eddying as the river of the title.
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Sprawl
“Dear Mrs. McLuhan: The end of a tube of toothpaste can cause guilty feelings and a sense of alienation. It’s a question of family values. You make the call.”
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A Dialogue at the Core of Her Being
Ai successfully blends personal autobiographical poems with her trademark dramatic monologues, making for a truly original text—a kind of personified hybridity—that is both haunting and humorous.
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The Wake of Forgiveness
Bruce Machart’s debut novel channels Cormac McCarthy, while narrating a Southern gothic tale centered around women.
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Dear Old Dad…
Anthony De Sa’s novel imagines two lives—a father who leaves one country but fails to thrive in another, and the son who spends his life trying to figure him out.
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Black Hole Sun
Ultimately, though, it’s the cadence of the voice that engages the reader. Slant rhyme, and skillfully enjambed couplets and tercets, are the real shakers.
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Teleny and Camille
A story of gay erotica often traced to Oscar Wilde has been made into a luscious graphic novel, courtesy of Nefarismo illustrator Jon Macy.
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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Underneath the bleeping trappings of science fiction is a domestic drama: immigrant family, fighting parents, middle-aged father with failed dreams, sensitive son, mother in denial.
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That Sick Feeling
Janice Shapiro’s characters see that the game of womanhood has no winners—and some are frantic for an escape that they do not find.
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Pastries, Cowboy Music / That Kind of Shit
Reading, and re-reading these poems, you’ll find lines which are so outrageous, hilarious, and true that they get lodged in your head, like songs; and, you’ll find yourself quoting the poems to others, because they seem so apt in their…