Category: Reviews & Criticism

By Light We Knew Our Names, stories by Anne Valente, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

Anne Valente’s first collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, offers up thirteen unique stories dealing with the difficult transitions from childhood to adulthood, the mystery of connection, the hardships of loss, and the crystalized moments when wonder is either abandoned or embraced. Many of the stories contain magical elements and could be classified as…
I Am Currently Working on a Novel, seventy-five stories by Rolli, reviewed by Adam Thomlison

The seventy-five stories in mononymous author Rolli’s new flash-fiction collection, I Am Currently Working on a Novel, waver between whimsical and bleak. The best ones are both. The stories are all bizarre in one way or another, and sitting down to this book feels much like one of those caffeine dreams that is a rapid…
What Happened Here, short stories by Bonnie ZoBell, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn

The stories in Bonnie ZoBell’s What Happened Here are linked by place, all tied to the San Diego community of North Park. The community was made famous by a terrible airplane accident in the 1970s that ended with a passenger plane crashing into the streets of the neighborhood, scattering both mechanical and human debris. This…
“Len Joy’s Debut Novel American Past Time Reflects Small Town America in the Mid-twentieth Century” by Gay Degani

“They cruised down Main Street, past the Tastee-Freeze and Dabney’s Esso Station and the Post Office and the First National Bank of Maple Springs and Crutchfield’s General Store. At the town’s only traffic light, he turned left toward the highway. At the edge of town they passed the colored Baptist Church with its nearly-tended grid…
The Blast, a novella by David Ohle, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter

It is not without merit that David Ohle’s last name rhymes with “holy.” For all intents and purposes, Ohle is the patron saint of a kind of psycho-dystopian absurdity that is at once brutal, hilarious, and weird. Sainthood, however, has been late in coming for Ohle. His first novel, Motorman, first published by the venerable…
“How You Get That Way?”: Candice Wuehle on the Ultravacant Poetics of Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey is a smart artist, a self-styled “gangster Nancy Sinatra.” She references Whitman, Plath, the Beats; wears and sings about heart-shaped sunglass as though she herself is a vintage cover (sonically, visually, textually) of Lolita. But it’s really only on her unreleased songs that she also sings about the murderous dark side of…
Leave Luck to Heaven, nonfiction essays by Brian Oliu, reviewed by Phil Spotswood

Born in 1991, I grew up watching my older brothers play original Nintendo games—living vicariously through them, who in turn were living vicariously through the heroes of the games. It was as if I grew up looking through a double-paned glass, and only when they had left for school could I step into that mysterious…
The Rusted City, poetry by Rochelle Hurt, reviewed by Justin Carter

I have a friend from Youngstown, Ohio, so when I first opened up Rochelle Hurt’s The Rusted City and found the book’s dedication was for the city, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Youngstown’s been through some tough times, which has earned it spots on lists like Buzzfeed’s “Bleakest Places on Earth” and Comcast’s “Top…
“The Banal and the Beautiful”: Sam Slaughter Reviews Alan Michael Parker’s The Committee on Town Happiness

I’ve got ninety-nine problems but this book ain’t one. Seriously, though, in Alan Michael Parker’s new collection of ninety-nine linked stories, The Committee on Town Happiness, it is hard to find an error in his ways. The stories all follow the titular committee, who oversees Generic Small Town A. In said small town, the committee…