Category: Reviews & Criticism

Book Review: John Brown Spiers on Vertigo, short stories by Joanna Walsh

Vertigo is the kind of book it’s easy to let yourself be fooled by. It is smaller than the average prose collection. It is shorter. It has a very low number of lines per page, something you might realize if you flip through it or glance at a screenshot. These facts will make an impression…
The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, a novel by Leland Cheuk, reviewed by Ben Duax

The Asian American experience is a history of erasure. Generations of Asians in America have been forced to deal with attempts to define them as uniquely other, from the Angell treaty of 1880, which limited ships arriving in America to no more than fifteen Chinese, to the internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war.…
Nonfiction Review: Vivian Wagner on Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, a memoir by Lori Jakiela

Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe tells the story, on one level, of Lori Jakiela’s search for her birth mother. She encounters more than she expects in this search, however, and the story ends up being as much a self-exploration as it is a search for someone outside of herself. It’s a complicated,…
Fiction Review: Mika Kennedy on The Farmacist by Ashley Farmer

The digital is often framed as a site of contagion—one can contract fatal viruses (or send them). One can suffer the pollution of good ol’ American values—the allure of exotic chrome and pixels from the Silicon Valley proving altogether too enticing. Indeed, the Valley itself was once good ol’ American farmland, before wresting technological eminence…
Fiction Review: Zachary Kocanda on Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France by Bryan Hurt

Not too long ago, I read of a city in France that installed short story dispensers, a reason to travel to the country even if one is not, say, the ambassador to the country, a career I had not considered before reading Bryan Hurt’s debut collection. Thankfully, readers do not have to use a short…
“A Cloudy Morality Tale”: Benjamin Kinney Reviews Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor

Dating back to the old saying “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you,” there is an understanding in our society that performing good deeds is a lucrative venture. Only recently have authors and artists begun to unpack the logic of this statement: if we perform good deeds for others with the…
“Sometimes Grief Can Be Its Own Police”: A Conversation on the Moving Picture I’m Not Patrick by Julia Mae Ftacek, Matt Weinkam, & Jason Teal

Starting Heavy Feather as a publishing outfit in the Midwest, there have always been more successful, tenured venues I looked up to as goliaths to emulate in independent literature. Two Dollar Radio was one of those presses, early on, by which I became shell shocked, browsing their thirty-odd titles on display at my first AWP…
Hybrid Review: Sarah Katz on Intersex, lyrical essays/prose poems by Aaron Apps

Blood bubbles, silver fat, gut foam, chestnut fluid—you’re not supposed to look at or think about these things, but that’s the name of the game as a reader of Intersex. With his memoir of lyrical essays/prose poems and photographs, Aaron Apps—who also authored Compos(t) Mentis (BlazeVox, 2012), and Dear Herculine (Ahsahta Press, 2014), winner of the…
Alex Gallo-Brown: Remarks on Ben Lerner’s Novel 10:04

About a quarter of the way through Ben Lerner’s recent novel 10:04, the novel’s narrator, a Brooklyn-based writer/professor who holds an uncanny resemblance to his creator, is informed by an acquaintance, “You sound like your novel.” He has just finished introducing himself this way: “I wanted to wave to you when you came in but I had…