Reviews
2620 posts
What Is an Anthem
A poet doesn’t review the poems in G.C. Waldrep’s Archicembalo—she listens to them.
One of These Things is Not Like the Others
Stephanie Johnson’s microfiction creates rich subtext in few words, making each story complicated and true, and each character alive and familiar.
Not-So-Ancient History
A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
You Caught Me
Tao Lin’s characters are constantly connected, yet physically detached. The technology they live and breathe often seems less mechanical than its users.
But Not for Long
Michelle Wildgen’s second novel traces the residents of a sustainable-food co-op through crises, adjustments, and reinventions.
A Gate at the Huh?
Despite this novel’s serious flaws, it is a gratifying experience. You don’t so much read Lorrie Moore’s books as inhabit them—after which they inhabit you.
A New Cult of Domesticity
The speaker of The King doesn’t play into the randomly generated poems and discursive ironies of her generation; she lifts the curtain to the production, exposing the history of language’s…
Wild Kingdom
“Lydia Millet is one of the loosest writers I know. Her work takes rare risks with subject matter and form, and does so with a sense of jazzy improvisation.”
Rooms of Their Own
Three generations of women cope with isolation, grief, and sex, in the first novel by the celebrated story writer, Rachel Sherman.
The Organization of Pain and Joy
Tom Healy’s first collection of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, is fashioned entirely of artful silence and alluring reticence.
Fables of the Reconstruction
With patience reminiscent of Tolstoy, Cornelia Nixon weaves a tapestry of events to explain how an ordinary girl in post-Civil War Maryland kills her lover and gets away with it.