Reclamation, Reassembly, and Recognition: Jasminne Méndez’s Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e
What happens when the source of grief comes from within?
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Posts Tagged: review
Revolutionary Anger: Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad
The most important idea within the book is that our anger, in all its shapes, is justified.
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Beautiful Evil: The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Alaska attracts those looking to be free from the constraints of society.
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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.
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Living Proof: A Review of Wild Wild Country
The story of Rajneeshpuram is told in a series of events and everything within it is true. But it is not real. It does not come alive.
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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.
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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.
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Bodies Testing Boundaries: The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld
The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld is a profound debut that carefully undermines the foundational assumptions we have about other people.
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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
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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.
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Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
Vastness does not always mean an abyss.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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 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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Inequality Is Everyone’s Problem: The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne
Inequality, in Payne’s eyes, is massively detrimental to everyone in unequal societies, and everyone needs to know it.
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The Whimsy and Discipline of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day
If people cannot be captured, if “there are only erasures,” then might as well seek them in elisions, where their potential remains.
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A Full-Throated Cry from a Clarion: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
We seem to be floating in a weird soup of truthiness and alternative facts. Perhaps the state of American life explains the explosive power of The Book of Joan, or perhaps it’s the other way around; perhaps, at last, American life is ready for Lidia Yuknavitch.
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