Am I a Redundant Human Being?
A lost literary voice from early 1900s Austria slyly addresses female self-loathing and finds answers with unsettling modern relevance.
Reviews
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Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague’s charted worlds range from the exotic to the quotidian, from Tikal to a San Francisco classroom.
Welcome to the Occupation
A short novel by Michael Knight sees the post-WWII occupation of Japan through the eyes of a confused typist in General MacArthur’s office.
Nothing Can Outlast Its Loss
[Nick Laird's] steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes.
Less Is More
The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating.
Dead Ahead
Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader.
Serious Men
Manu Joseph’s satirizes contemporary India, “pounding away at the caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball.”
Return Them to Their Sources Uninterpreted
Each conceit, each stanza, each line in Lovely, Raspberry sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz’s absurdism, aspects of the human…
The Silent Woman
An account of the marriage between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller says a lot about the actress’s hygiene and sexual habits. The relationship, not so much.
The Tiki King
“Zahlah quit the bed and saw her dark reflection in the full-length mirror. An American woman. That’s what she saw. Liberated and humiliated.”
As If the Stars Invented Dinner
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted.
Elegant Trash
In his second book, Rob Sheffield uses ‘80s pop to explore adolescent memories, complex emotions, and the woes of being the de facto “gay friend.”