Reviews
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Joey was Dorothy, and I was Almost Dorothy
Page after page finds de la Flor purposefully mixing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry all together in long prosy lines that bend genre and gender, time and space.
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The Ghost of Milagro Creek
“The heat grew into a living thing. I felt all of us hunkering down and shrinking back to mother earth with our hearts racing toward each other. There was no relief except in prayer.”
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All the Whiskey in Heaven
In short, [Charles] Bernstein is taking apart the structures of conventional poetry, and more generally of the language we use every day – and which in turn uses us – in order to return us to a more basic relationship…
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Herself, Only Reversed
The Hollywood dreams of this novel’s heroine are much like the tenets of her fundamentalist upbringing: first sacrifice, then redemption, then apocalyptic paradise.
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The Queen of Flash Fiction
In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the…
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The Private Lives of Trees
The second novella by Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, one of the “Bogotá 39” influential Latin American writers, uses metafiction to tell a delicate, emotionally complex story.
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Time Loops, Child Molesters, and Sparkly Tube Tops
McGlynn’s book follows an almost fairy-tale-type logic – the unknowing past-self of the narrator plays the part of the last wife of Bluebeard, searching out the hidden rooms, with the watching future-self unable to keep her from finding the closet…
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O Fallen Angel
The tale of a bipolar, Midwestern prostitute and her Catholic family feels all-too-familiar to our Midwest-born reviewer.
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I Was the Jukebox
Sandra Beasley’s crisp images and multiplicities galore construct an enlivened world for her reader, bringing what Gregory Orr calls, “authority of imagination…” Each poem is an experiment that recreates from the codex of language a powerful brand of imagination.
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What He’s Poised to Do
A new collection of stories by New Yorker staff writer Ben Greenman moves from Chicago to North Africa to… the moon.
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Boys and Girls Like You and Me
“The earth was crowded with people who would never try to find me if I disappeared. A person is missing only if another person misses them.”
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Ether
No, Beatty! Don’t start telling your English teacher about your essay on Pope when he has his fingers in your knickers!