Reviews
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Living Outside the Narrative in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
The Idiot dramatizes the alienation, and even heartbreak, of losing the narrative thread of your existence.
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What It Means to Hold and Be Held in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell
The book explores ambiguities—in terms of race, in terms of motherhood, but especially in terms of the body and the subconscious.
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The Myth of the Troubled Female in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Sometimes it’s necessary to shift one’s moral compass, and sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it.
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The Lucky Ones Are Those Who Do Not Disappear
Pachico offers is an anthropological view of small, beautifully evoked human experiences—an ethnography of survival, memory, and nostalgia.
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Lines Like Poems unto Themselves: Anthony Madrid’s Try Never
My favorite poems in this book aren’t my favorites because of what they say or do as poems, but because they have the best individual lines.
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Celebrating Failures in Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House
Who has time for Writer Problems in the midst of all these PROBLEMS?
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Science Is Sexy in There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You
In the first story of this collection, a girl learns the shocking truth that the world is made of atoms, that “when you get right down to it, it’s all just studs and holes.”
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Ariel Levy’s Queer Generation
The playful sense of shifting identity applies to feminists, to writers, to anyone who chooses to believe we can reinvent ourselves.
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Going Beneath the Scarred Exterior in She May Be a Saint
Nichols wants us to know that, like every woman scorned, whether by an individual or by society, her maenad was initially innocent and loving. Beneath a scarred exterior, that innocent still resides.
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Biblical Rebels and Romantics in The First Love Story
Adam and Eve are the Bible’s most infamous couple: Bonnie and Clyde, year zero.
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The Strangely Plausible Abyss of American War
In Akkad’s dystopian scenario, the US faces a resurgent Mexico and a vast and newly powerful North African-Arabian empire.
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Lesley Nneka Arimah’s Characters Muscle Their Way through Girlhood
In our current political climate with its rampant animosity towards immigrants, Arimah offers a humanizing portrait of both the Nigerian citizen and first generation young female immigrant.