“stones will know”: On Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood
Hood wonders how to write rape and its aftermath when its very nature is fragmentation, a form that disqualifies it as a story.
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A Poetics of Witness: Jeddie Sophronius’s Interrogation Records
Sophronius writes from an awareness of Chinese Indonesian marginality, yet the pulse of the collection’s counternarrative coheres around an Indonesian national identity.
Queer Mormon Joy Beyond the Fairy Tale: AJ Romriell’s Wolf Act
...the sacred and the profane are hidden in each other’s disguises, like Red Riding Hood’s Granny with her suspiciously sharp teeth.
Endless Leisure: Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest is Silence
Under the right eyes, everything that Torres touches turns to gold.
No One Gets off Scot-Free: Jill McCorkle’s Old Crimes
This is such a powerful manifestation of fiction: as writers, much as we make stuff up, we are always writing someone’s story.
Sketch Book Review: Three Books About Rivers
When passionate individuals like these authors put pen to paper, they have the opportunity to create real change.
An Unsentimental Look at the ’90s: Gina Tron’s Suspect
Even her bad decisions, like lashing out at her bullies, are ones that feel relatable, if things were just a little different.
Echoes in the Gallery: Andy Young’s Museum of the Soon to Depart
...Young transforms these cities into an enigmatic museum, with galleries that reach back through time to the very essence of dust.
“It’d Be the Last Great Punk Song”: On ¡PÓNK! by Marcus Clayton
Punk is not safe, but neither is the world if you are Black or brown.
Writing in the Aftermath: Paul Rousseau’s Friendly Fire
It wasn’t until I was older and started hunting with my father that I began to understand the implications of proximity to gunfire.
One Can Be Alive Again: Madeleine Cravens’s Pleasure Principle
Cravens’s reliance on and loyalty to the image become a propulsive, vibrating force—this is a poetics of presence, of that which is tangible....
“Why Are You Still Resisting?”: On M.M. Olivas’s Sundown in San Ojuela
Olivas’s novel is a gross-as-hell ghost story and a razor-sharp vision of the present moment, a multi-narrator rollercoaster you’ll binge like your favorite television show.