Reviews
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Sketch Book Reviews: The Complete Gardener
What makes this book so different is the exceptional quality and thoughtfulness in Don’s writing.
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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.
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A Cult of Translation: Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey
Readers preferring more straightforward narratives won’t find one here.
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A Manifested Destiny: Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations
There is the power of money and its capacity to corrupt—money that flows often from the pockets of wealthy white men but sheds some green onto any hand it touches.
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A Palestinian Voice in Gaza: Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Here, the will to survive outlasts destruction. Here, Palestinians in Gaza coalesce with the land and its resilient growth and beauty.
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Genius or Madness: Patrick Langley’s The Variations
Like a piece of music or genetic code, the gift changes over time and according to who is experiencing it. Langley’s novel traces the shifts.
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Punctuating pseudo-realities: Daniel Lefferts’s Ways and Means
This is a world in which the “ways and means” of the novel’s title are no sure thing, in which the relationship of the protagonists to the money they have (or don’t have) easily exceeds tangible causality.