Reviews
-
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 (and romanticism’s) disintegration.
-
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.
-
John Dies at the End
An expanded on-line novel aimed at the teenage-slacker demo offers one too many penis jokes and pop-culture shout outs.
-
Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
Let’s face it: Even when you’re breaking up with a Dungeon Master who used to call you his “Faerie Dragon,” you still know you’re breaking up.