The Eternal Grind: Nick Rees Gardner’s Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts
A clever manipulator of time, Gardner doesn’t rely on the convenience of thirst to move his characters through the page.
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“I Am in Love With Moons”: My Lesbian Novel and To After That (TOAF) by Renee Gladman
But this is love: crying into your lover’s face until it becomes so ridiculous, that the event becomes absolutely precious.
Red as in: Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers
Perhaps like a phoenix, Martin maintains such a commanding presence throughout the book because she has endured the sacrificial fire of being a poet, the necessary self-immolation.
A Meditation on Magical Girls: Park Seolyeon’s A Magical Girl Retires
Park is not being cheeky. Rather, she’s taking a power that has lived in the hearts and minds of so many young people and propelling the magical girl genre into an entirely new dimension.
The Astonishing Power of African Poetry: A Review of New-Generation African Poets (Kumi)
Featuring gifted emerging poets from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa . . . Kumi is a final tribute to a visionary and valuable investment in African poetry.
The Possibilities Are Endless: Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights
[Valencia] portrays both the beauty and the horror of the desert, its landscape, and its inhabitants with the keen eye of someone who is intimately familiar with the rhythms and realities of desert life.
A Seaside Carnival of Narration: On Andrzej Tichý’s Purity
“You’ll be my way out. . . . And it makes no difference what you’re thinking or feeling, or whether or not you believe in transcendence or whatever you call it. I’m already inside of you.”
“There Is No Page That Can Hold Me”: Sam Sax’s Yr Dead
By insisting that Ezra’s ordinary life is epic, Sax shows that every life must be epic, holding everyone accountable. No one can sit out.
The Pawns of History Arise: Tania James’s Loot
What happens to the artist when his society shatters? How does he keep alive the impetus to create after losing his family and place in the world?
Finding A New “Happily Ever After”: Susan Ostrov’s Loveland
But for so many of us, love is “a puzzle with jig-sawed edges, and all we have are scattered, often missing, pieces of ourselves.
The Archive as Potter’s Field: Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman
As the handwritten stories unfold, the lives of the two ceramicists come closer and closer.
The Great Man and The Wife: On Controlling the Narrative in Sarah Manguso’s Liars
Marriage and motherhood become like invasive species that coil around Jane’s career, leeching her of energy and creative drive.