“A Game of Chance You Can Choose to Play or Not”: On Lauren Russell’s A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close
[Russell] creates breathing room by breaking genre expectations, so that everything invisible swoops into stark relief.
Reviews
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A Search for Country and Identity in Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography Of
It is Falomo’s legacy of rebirth, in rich, outstanding text, that there are things which must burn in order to be birthed anew
On Inheritance: Maureen Sun’s The Sisters K
By recasting this Slavophile opus as a critique of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, with a grand sense of philosophical rigor, Sun models anti-imperial engagement with the Russian canon.
Please Please Please: Casey McQuiston’s The Pairing
Few romance novels hit such emotional and sensual highs with the leads physically apart; fewer still so elegantly capture the fluid contours of gender and desire.
Slant Panes of Light: Emilie Menzel’s The Girl Who Became a Rabbit
Meaning is fleeting. Meaning is self-made.
I Like Books About Books: A Review of Shannon Reed’s Why We Read
WHY WE READ reminds us not only of where we began as readers but also where we could go if we release our inhibitions and allow ourselves to simply enjoy reading.
How to Win a Gunfight: Bret Anthony Johnston’s We Burn Daylight
The teens in this book seem to know something the adults don’t: that if they are going to have any kind of future, they must create it themselves.
Reversing the Apocalypse: A Review of Hussain Ahmed’s Blue Exodus
...the world of the dead, the living, and the unborn are all in a cycle. Human materiality is indestructible.
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.
“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.