Category: Reviews & Criticism

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…
Dryland, a novel by Sara Jaffe, reviewed by Genevieve Hudson

Think back to your early teenage years. What do you remember? Perhaps specific moments come flooding back. Maybe it’s more of a general feeling tinged in dusky sepia. It is a time when we are figuring out how to define ourselves, when we are learning what we want to say no to and when we…
The Secret Games of Words, stories by Karen Stefano, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Writers should excel to be more than simple transcribers of thought and action; they should be the stethoscope of every letter and every word, taking the pulse as it quickens and stops. Karen Stefano, author of The Secret Games of Words, is one of those writers, and the collection’s theme is a type of wordplay on steroids—not…
Nick Sweeney on With Animal, a collaborative short story collection by Carol Guess & Kelly Magee

Fiction shows the humanity of our own nature. It’s a reflection of what is and what could be. With Animal, cowritten by Carol Guess & Kelly Magee, is one of those collections of fictions. It squirms, it screams, it claws at you. With every story, the reader is introduced to animals, to mothers, to the…
Baldur’s Gate II, a nonfiction book by Matt Bell, reviewed by Ryan Werner

Once a year, I drive an hour and a half to get pictures with some old wrestlers in Waterloo, Iowa. Danny Hodge, a retired boxer and wrestler with double tendons in his wrists that allow him to pop apples and break pliers, is always there. Jim Ross is there, too. Aside from his time in…