Reviews

Ann Rower was 53 when she made her literary debut with this collection of personal essays and stories. Initially published by Semiotext(e) in 1991 as the first entry of their Native Agents series that platformed women in an overly male literary landscape, If You’re a Girl captured the spit and vinegar of mid-late twentieth-century female bohemia.

We first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.

Through her terse yet piercing consideration of this school fight...Manthey asks us to look directly into the historically charged layers of the book’s eponymous fight.

The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.

Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.

The summer expands in front of them, and their future disappears. The cheap housing they are cooped up in becomes even less glamorous during the blackouts.

His fictional world, as presented in this novella, develops a split truth, one where narrative reality and absurdist abstraction hang in the balance.