Reviews Archives - Page 54 of 221

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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