Scrutinizing the Ties That Bind: Melissa Febos’s Girlhood
By the end of the collection, Febos has managed to rewrite or erase entirely many parts of the patriarchal script that held her bound.
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Child as Mother to the Woman: Catherine Gammon’s China Blue
In this book we are taken by all three: language, plot, character.
The Past Is All We Have: André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis
Is it not in the warm chambers of the past, after all, that we are immortal, invincible, and alive?
Panic Mode: The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld
Cyclical patterns of journalism notwithstanding, Gladstone sees this moment as uniquely concerning.
Pockets of Belonging: Wandeka Gayle’s Motherland: And Other Stories
The characters of Motherland might be displaced, but they are never alone.
Other Stories, Other Lives: Life among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks
By the time the television cameras arrive, the rest of the world may be surprised, but we’re not.
To Set Asunder: The Separation and Synthesis of Tiana Nobile’s Cleave
A word becomes a reckoning, a reconciling of contradiction.
The Reconstruction of Derrida: Peter Salmon’s An Event, Perhaps
The key insight is that names, and indeed all boundaries, involve a hierarchy.
Unsettled Memories: First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
Author and narrator, fiction and memory, never settle comfortably into their proper places.
Electric Synthesis: Drakkar Noir by Michael Chang
Chang’s style imitates internet culture and the patterns of an anxious mind. But there’s also glamour.
Both of These Things Are True: Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger
The frame expands. The structure collapses. The pieces are still speaking.
Hauntings in the Kingdom of Money: Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel
There is an admiration, here, of the transitory soul.