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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I Like Books About Books: A Review of Shannon Reed’s Why We Read
WHY WE READ reminds us not only of where we began as readers but also where we could go if we release our inhibitions and allow ourselves to simply enjoy reading.
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How to Win a Gunfight: Bret Anthony Johnston’s We Burn Daylight
The teens in this book seem to know something the adults don’t: that if they are going to have any kind of future, they must create it themselves.
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Reversing the Apocalypse: A Review of Hussain Ahmed’s Blue Exodus
…the world of the dead, the living, and the unborn are all in a cycle. Human materiality is indestructible.
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The Eternal Grind: Nick Rees Gardner’s Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts
A clever manipulator of time, Gardner doesn’t rely on the convenience of thirst to move his characters through the page.