Reviews
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The Potential Literature of Life: Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Stop talking to anyone, everyone, about your new projects—just be quiet and think.
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Curiosity is the Devil’s Lure: Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark
Colanzi is rebelling against the loss of collective memory of tragedy, against the unbearable fact that things go back to normal faster than they should.
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Let it tremble in riotous beauty: Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s To Love an Island
Our love should make us quake, quake like a storm, a storm that tears down “the whole blood-marbled edifice.”
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The Gravity of Displacement: Balsam Karam’s The Singularity
A refugee tale is always about the children, not least because they are the tellers.
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Our Anesthetized Culture: Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld
You can probably describe your algorithmic content with a comical level of detail—the unsolicited stuff you’re targeted with each time you go online. Mine includes nail art, vegan-alternative recipes for candy bars, and “get ready with me” videos of women…
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Psychedelic Revision: Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dream of Empires
It is in their form—ravaging, dumb, dreamlike, free—that we can glean momentary order from Enrigue’s comic humor.
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Sketch Book Reviews: Ardor
Knorr . . . makes a variety of forms and experiments into a cohesive artifact.
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Competing Impulses: Blake Butler’s Molly
“Should I be allowed to make this said? To bring to light a part of Molly’s story she covered over at any cost?”
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Coming-of-age into Fame: Ben Fama’s If I Close My Eyes
Masterful prose…a novel that takes an unflinching view of what some might do for fame and ratings.
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The Circumstance of Expectancy: Sara Gallardo’s January
From the early pages of the novel, she laments, “It’s a different story for rich girls, they have their ways,” which is a very elegant way of throwing one’s arms up and shouting that it isn’t fair to a world…
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A Mortal Education: Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions
In one of Solomon’s early lessons, he pushes Archy toward thoughts of his own mortality for the first time before offering religion as a solution to existential dread.
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“Good Buy” to All That: Pip Adam’s The New Animals
It’s imaginative fiction in a way that is jolting to the auto-fiction that is so prevalent today, and it allows Adam to make commentary on the disasters of human ambition.