Struggling toward Truth: Porochista Khakpour’s Sick
Khakpour gathers courage, again and again, as she reaches into the most painful parts of her life, excavates them, and holds them up to the light.
...more
Posts Tagged: book review
Learning to Grow Where Planted: Maggie Smith’s Good Bones
Part of looking closer is seeing what is hard to face, and part of having courage is addressing what seems futile.
...more
To Choose Music: Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble
The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit.
...more
A Myth of Her Own Making: The Pisces by Melissa Broder
Broder opens up a fantastical vein to offer a glimpse at how we might find each other again.
...more
Faith and Identity: Fireworks in the Graveyard by Joy Ladin
To “ameliorate” the desire for death or the sense of self-annihilation, Ladin finds in religion a way of reconciliation, not only within herself, but also with her community and society at large.
...more
Going Higher: Unearthings by Wendy Chen
Chen’s sense of history is reason enough to appreciate her poetry, but equally thrilling is her language.
...more
Trust Us When We’re Sick: Maya Dusenbery’s Doing Harm
The systems created for men by men are not sufficient in caring for women. Different bodies and chemical makeups, of course, require different treatments.
...more
Uncovering Buried Roots: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater
There are two ways to read Freshwater: there is the knowing and the unknowing.
...more
Wide-Eyed and Awed: Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had so I drew it
Lester often weaves past and present, the personal and the vast into one poem, leaping between these seeming opposites.
...more
A Source of Life: Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
There’s a lot left unsaid between the women of Red Clocks; not even they know the extent to which they’re all connected.
...more
Gentrification Looks Like Us: Making Rent in Bed-Stuy by Brandon Harris
Harris thoughtfully examines what happens when privilege and lack of privilege are forced to coexist in the same neighborhood—and, occasionally, in the same apartment.
...more
Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart
Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear.
...more
Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone
I can’t help but wonder what if, in detangling love stories and our relationships to them, Catron is building yet another narrative—an anti-narrative, perhaps—of love.
...more
Not Your Typical Hero: Hostage by Guy Delisle
Against the muscular inevitability of Hollywood heroism, Hostage introduces the possibility that, in the face of the incomprehensible, we might remain ourselves.
...more
At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
...more
Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
Vastness does not always mean an abyss.
...more
The Occupation of America: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
[Moving Kings] has brilliant things to say about America and Israel, war and peace, diaspora and home.
...more
Reclaiming the Language of Pop Culture: Reversible by Marisa Crawford
Marisa Crawford’s Reversible is an evocative collection, showcasing the ways in which pop culture saturates us with meaning, and how it teaches us to become.
...more
Gogol Meets Google: Made for Love by Alissa Nutting
[A]ttempts to relegate human impulses to some eminently manageable virtual domain end up revealing more about humanity than tech.
...more
You’re My Home Now: Lisa Ko’s The Leavers
First-time novelist Lisa Ko impressively employs a fractured narrative to portray the plight of fractured people, but don’t expect conventional satisfactions.
...more
Grief Is Not Regret: May Cause Love by Kassi Underwood
When women do not want a pregnancy, we may not experience the marvel and awe some claim are instant and “natural”—or, if we do, they are overshadowed by fear, and grief.
...more
Say Everything: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Truth is complicated, thorny, and often paradoxical. Marzano-Lesnevich advocates for a version of events that doesn’t attempt to simplify its subjects, that doesn’t reduce human life to weak metaphors.
...more
Embrace the Physical World: Touch by Courtney Maum
Touch is a compelling argument that we should embrace the physical world, genuine human connections, and reject the technology that comes between us and other people.
...more
Unbridled Power in All Its Majestic Terror: Will Bardenwerper’s The Prisoner in His Palace
As we begin our own Age of the Strongman, Hussein’s almost effortless manipulation—of soldiers expecting exactly that behavior—shows how susceptible we all might be to the sheer force of a big personality.
...more
When Theory and Fiction Collide: Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac
Theory and fiction have a history. They’d been flirting with each other for centuries and now regularly engage in textual intercourse.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more