Reviews
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Rich Kids Want to Die Too: Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized
…[BERLIN ATOMIZED is] about the internal and external chaos of growing up during globalization in an exploding, rootless world—one in which young people can’t tell who they are.
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“stones will know”: On Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood
Hood wonders how to write rape and its aftermath when its very nature is fragmentation, a form that disqualifies it as a story.
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A Poetics of Witness: Jeddie Sophronius’s Interrogation Records
Sophronius writes from an awareness of Chinese Indonesian marginality, yet the pulse of the collection’s counternarrative coheres around an Indonesian national identity.
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Queer Mormon Joy Beyond the Fairy Tale: AJ Romriell’s Wolf Act
…the sacred and the profane are hidden in each other’s disguises, like Red Riding Hood’s Granny with her suspiciously sharp teeth.
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Endless Leisure: Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest is Silence
Under the right eyes, everything that Torres touches turns to gold.
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No One Gets off Scot-Free: Jill McCorkle’s Old Crimes
This is such a powerful manifestation of fiction: as writers, much as we make stuff up, we are always writing someone’s story.
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Sketch Book Review: Three Books About Rivers
When passionate individuals like these authors put pen to paper, they have the opportunity to create real change.
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An Unsentimental Look at the ’90s: Gina Tron’s Suspect
Even her bad decisions, like lashing out at her bullies, are ones that feel relatable, if things were just a little different.
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Echoes in the Gallery: Andy Young’s Museum of the Soon to Depart
…Young transforms these cities into an enigmatic museum, with galleries that reach back through time to the very essence of dust.
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“It’d Be the Last Great Punk Song”: On ¡PÓNK! by Marcus Clayton
Punk is not safe, but neither is the world if you are Black or brown.
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Writing in the Aftermath: Paul Rousseau’s Friendly Fire
It wasn’t until I was older and started hunting with my father that I began to understand the implications of proximity to gunfire.
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One Can Be Alive Again: Madeleine Cravens’s Pleasure Principle
Cravens’s reliance on and loyalty to the image become a propulsive, vibrating force—this is a poetics of presence, of that which is tangible….