Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ruyan Meng’s Novel The Morgue Keeper

Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper is an intense book, maybe more so than any book I’ve read since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Across 200 pages and 27 chapters, it tells the story of Qing Yuan, a morgue keeper trying to survive China’s Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. Essentially assigned to clean dead bodies…
“In Search of Lost Monsters”: Adam M. Rosen Reads Chelsea Sutton’s Novella Krackle’s Last Movie

Being a documentary filmmaker is a bit like trying to play God. They must embark on an agonizing process of creation, sifting endlessly through old interviews, letters, journals, and other raw archival bric-a-brac, cutting and reassembling the disparate bits and pieces until they merge into a single coherent narrative. The reward is that, under the…
Fiction Review: Kymberli Roberson Reads Dana Diehl’s New Collection The Earth Room

Dana Diehl takes us on a journey very few undertake in life in her short story collection, The Earth Room. It’s one of feminist self-discovery, of magical realism, the inherent organic bond between mankind and nature regardless of age, and the human psyche. This journey challenges not only the characters populating the stories themselves, but…
Fiction Review: Emily Hall Reads Kristina Ten’s Debut Collection Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine

Kristina Ten’s debut short-story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, is filled with female protagonists who refuse to acquiesce. Delightfully defiant, and reminiscent of Dahlia de la Cerda’s riotous Reservoir Bitches, Ten’s characters shrug off taboos and aren’t afraid of using violence to ensure their autonomy. Across the twelve stories in Tell Me…
Fiction Review: Sarah Bowen Holloway Reads Diane Josefowicz’s Linked Story Collection Guardians & Saints

Connected stories make up much of this wonderfully gnarly collection, Josefowicz’s third book of fiction, yet each of the offerings stands (and sings) alone, too. Many of these eleven tales include a doctor—usually a psychiatrist—and characters who suffer mental or physical illness. Protagonists or important characters are articulate, relatable children who are bewildered and brave…
Fiction Review: Emily Webber Reads Laura Venita Green’s Debut Novel Sister Creatures

A character in Laura Venita Green’s debut novel tells her daughter, “You’ve got to keep the wilderness at bay somehow.” Sister Creatures follows four women from the same small town, Pinecreek, in Louisiana, as they. Green blends both realistic fiction, horror, and supernatural elements as the women try to escape past trauma and toxic relationships…
Nonfiction Review: Daniel Barbiero Reads Mark Polizzotti’s Utopic Essay Collection Jump Cuts

Jump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics, an elegant and thought-provoking new collection of pieces by Mark Polizzotti, opens with an item about poet Paul Eluard’s curiously abrupt disappearance from Paris in March of 1924. Eluard’s months-long abscondment took him to Saigon, with a number of stops at exotic ports…
Poetry Review: Ben Tripp Reads Susan Landers’ Collection What to Carry into the Future

People sometimes ask poets: “Is your writing true, or did you just make it all up?” The truth (so far as poetry is concerned, anyway) is usually a combination of both, as in the latest collection from Brooklyn-based poet Susan Landers: What to Carry into the Future. The book deftly hybridizes a certain accessible kind…
“A Glass of Milk for Our Collective Gall”: Matthew Zhao on Natalie Louise Tombasco’s Poetry Collection Milk for Gall

Natalie Louise Tombasco invokes Shakespeare to great effect in the title of her debut collection, Milk for Gall, by promising the gamut from comedy to drama and delivering it all with aplomb. The collection’s title comes from the famous speech by Lady Macbeth in Macbeth Act I, Scene V, in which she declares, “Come to…