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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review
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.