The “Reality” of Memoir: Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story
Memoirists are not transcriptionists of their pasts, recalling conversations verbatim. They are artists, whose job is to interpret the lived history through an artistic lens.
Reviews
2612 posts
An Ambitious Atlas of Fears: Catherine Pierce’s The Tornado Is the World
Pierce’s poems approach danger from surprising angles. Do you fear the tornado? Then come inside it and hear it speak.
The Many Faces of Arab Culture: Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Narratives like this one complicate and humanize America’s simplistic view of Arab cultures, toppling the flimsy idea that Arab people are intractably Other.
Worlds Full of Demons: Chavisa Woods’s Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country
We must ask ourselves: who stands in the shadows of our national persona, both historically and in the nation’s literature? Woods raises the question, and her work points toward an answer.
A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks
In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them.
Haunted by Child Refugees: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends
These aren’t ghosts; these are children who have braved a perilous journey to escape the violent nightmares back home.
Family Is the Deepest Scar: Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother
With each word, I found myself thinking of my own grandmother’s journey, escaping war to America with no money, no education, and six children, the pain of this experience inevitably hardening the whole family.
All of the Facts and None of the Truth: Fox Frazier-Foley’s Like Ash in the Air after Something Has Burned
While these women are physically gone, they gain agency after their deaths through Frazier-Foley’s poems.
Pressing Back against the Pressure: A Woman of Property by Robyn Schiff
It’s about pressure. The pressure of one being enveloping another being, of one mother hugging her child, of a greater force subsuming and defining a lesser.
Science Fiction Can Change the World: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
With Borne VanderMeer presents a parable about modern life, in these shaky days of roughshod industrialism, civilizational collapse, and looming planetary catastrophe.
The Queer Valentine of the Century: Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet
In Full Velvet offers the truth of a woman’s life—the queer truth, the queer rose, the queer valentine. And everything is different after that moment of initiation, instantiation.
The Otherworldly Intrigue of Daisy Johnson’s Fen
As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist.