Reviews
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Waterworld
Loss and longing sit side-by-side with unexpected humor in Laura van den Berg’s stories, reminding readers of the strange things we encounter every day.
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Iron Chef
A jilted lover expresses her lust, hatred, and remorse through exquisite courses of caviar, duck, and tongue.
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What Is an Anthem
A poet doesn’t review the poems in G.C. Waldrep’s Archicembalo—she listens to them.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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But Not for Long
Michelle Wildgen’s second novel traces the residents of a sustainable-food co-op through crises, adjustments, and reinventions.
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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.
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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 (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
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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.”
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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.
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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.