Book Reviews

[ad_1] When Elisa Gabbert began writing The Unreality of Memory in 2016, she said she was writing about the end of the world. Disasters, more specifically. Her mother corrected her once, though, saying, “Isn’t it more about how we think about disasters?” which Gabbert says is a loose summation of what her second essay collection … Read more

[ad_1] When I finished Shane McCrae’s newest book of poetry, Sometimes I Never Suffered, I immediately missed his two main characters: the Hastily Assembled Angel and Jim Limber. The former is a detached but sincere fictional guide through a reimagined and repurposed Old Testament. The latter, the adopted Black son of Jefferson Davis, asks the … Read more

[ad_1] On April 8, 1921, Virginia Woolf notes in her diary, “and I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room, and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t…” What might a present-day adaptation of a writer’s jottings look like? Fleeting and mostly lost in the vertically moving digital social archives. … Read more

[ad_1] As someone who normally reads standalone literary fiction, I sometimes find it challenging to approach genre fiction, namely because it’s hard to know exactly where to start. I’ve found myself picking up a fantasy novel at the library, reading a chapter or two in utter confusion, only to then realize I’m in book two … Read more

[ad_1] What Happens at Night is the latest masterpiece from Peter Cameron, a brazenly literary writer whose quietly ambitious novels and stories have for decades chronicled the frustrations and complications born from desire, as his often-troubled characters struggle toward true connection. And while his previous books have most often explored relationships between gay men, both … Read more

[ad_1] Writers don’t need to have supernatural abilities to foretell the future; we just need vivid imaginations, intense curiosity, and the ability to logically extrapolate what comes next and next and next. The world we’re writing in always has some differences from the world our books are released into, resembling the current world more or … Read more

[ad_1] A quote from Toni Morrison—“It is not only about ‘us’; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.”—is the first epigram in here is the sweet hand, francine j. harris’ newest collection. The use of Morrison’s quote informs us of the personal nature of the expansive, crackling poems to come. … Read more

[ad_1] While reading “Your Second Wife,” the second-to-last story in Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, you might immediately think that it’s a criticism of society at large, another argument against late capitalism and its blatant excess thinly-veiled in fiction. “We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow … Read more

[ad_1] Attention animal lovers, nature lovers, literary lovers—the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning author Becky Mandelbaum has written a book just for you. The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals is Mandelbaum’s debut novel, and it is characterized by love the size of the Kansas sky, an indelible attachment to home, and enough dogs to comfort you through … Read more

[ad_1] In 1966, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, a reimagining of Jane Eyre that delved into the past and present of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason. Simply seen as the omnipresent ‘madwoman’ in Bronte’s novel, Rhys gave her a complex inner world and humanized her apparent madness. There have been numerous spiritual successors … Read more