Holding a Mirror to Realism in The Novices of Lerna
His fictional world, as presented in this novella, develops a split truth, one where narrative reality and absurdist abstraction hang in the balance.
Reviews
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Is this the Danish Girl, Interrupted? Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom
“Have you ever confused a dream with life?”
A Panoptical View of Slough: On Sylvia Legris’s The Principle of Rapid Peering
Scattered with a sparse collection of the poet’s original sketches . . . the poems move through the slanted and repetitive months of the pandemic, bleeding into “self-digesting” seasons.
A Dance of One’s Own: Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera
The return of someone deceased is a common enough trope, but where it is normally horrific . . . Polek initially runs jolly with it.
So Foreign Yet So Familiar: Three Early Novels by Amit Chaudhuri
But Chaudhuri pays keen attention to these seemingly self-evident truths, articulating what we think we know but keep forgetting.
A Comedy of Venture Capitalism: Ryan Chapman’s The Audacity
PrevYou is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley . . . The only problem? The claims are phony.
Between Conceptualism and Hyperpop in Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle
Here, failure to be “personal” reveals the unconscious biases that structures readers’ expectations of what counts as “personal.”
Seeing What You Can’t Hear: Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test
. . . ruminations on the creative process and what it means when your sense of self is upended through a series of small violences capture the mundanity in trudging through a long-term illness.
A Carousel of Feminine Experience: Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
The stories she tells are profoundly intimate yet universal, with themes of self-doubt, irredeemable nostalgia, and uneasy nuclear families.
Sketch Book Reviews: The Complete Gardener
What makes this book so different is the exceptional quality and thoughtfulness in Don's writing.
Perfumed by Fear: Silvia Guerra’s A Sea at Dawn
Guerra attempts to maneuver around obstacles with riverine language, and tensions organize around this effort.
A Cult of Translation: Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey
Readers preferring more straightforward narratives won’t find one here.