Reviews
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Like Mercury Over a Wall of Garnets
A particular joy of this book is the apprehension of current—biological, electric and historical, and in other forms—that distinguishes the most rigorously thrumming beats from their sallow imitators.
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The Unveiled Animal
Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption.
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Wait
Now in his seventh decade, C. K. Williams has published many books and won the big prizes, but the poems in Wait are fresh—he does not merely rely on old blueprints, but continues the struggles that have preoccupied him throughout…
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One Art
Michael Sledge’s novel The More I Owe You imagines Elizabeth Bishop’s life, and love, in Brazil.
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The Work of the Day, Which is Slaughtering
In Joshua Cohen’s hyperreal world of kitsch, the Sabbath becomes law, Auschwitz becomes Whateverwitz, and the world’s last Jew is on the run.
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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…