Category: Reviews & Criticism

Chapel of Inadvertent Joy, poetry by Jeffrey McDaniel, reviewed by Zachary Fishel

Jeffry McDaniel’s fifth book, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy, is an aptly titled collection of poems worth returning to again and again. The book is separated into three sections, each focusing on themes of love, middle-age, and how it feels to bite through life with wooden teeth. Which is fine for many writers, but McDaniel ups…
Collected Alex, a novella by A.T. Grant, reviewed by Matt Weinkam

IIn part one of A.T. Grant’s three-part novella Collected Alex (winner of the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition) a boy named Alex receives a dead body from his parents for his eighth birthday. “My parents held each other and watched as I inspected it. They were so excited,” Alex tells us. “What am I supposed to…
In Pieces, short works by Marion Fayolle, reviewed by Nick Francis Potter

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Thirty-some-odd years ago, Will Eisner, in an effort to legitimize comics as a serious art form, pitched his collection, A Contract with God, as a “graphic novel.” Eisner didn’t coin the term, but he definitely popularized it, and while many comics scholars now recognize (rightly, by my estimation)…
Reckoning, a novel by Rusty Barnes, reviewed by Dan Townsend

Rusty Barnes’s first novel, Reckoning, is the story of Richard, a fourteen-year-old country boy, who finds a woman naked and left for dead in the woods. Through this woman, Misty, Richard accesses the dark side of the small farming town where he lives. Motivated by teenage curiosity, hormones, and a fragile sense of down-home morality,…
The Last Days of California, a novel by Mary Miller, reviewed by Sam Price

There’s a theory in neuroscience that brains “couple” when undergoing successful communication. The speaker’s brain will utilize its portions that are necessary for speech production while the listener, with a slight delay, uses the portions that are necessary for speech comprehension. If the brains aren’t “coupled,” there is little retained knowledge in the listener, even…
EarthBound, nonfiction by Ken Baumann, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

EarthBound—and I mean the videogame here, not the store—was released stateside for the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) in 1995. On front of the packaging, an imposing gold Starman stood with its hands … or tentacles … planted on its hips against a psychedelic backdrop. Reflected in its visor was a small boy wearing a…
Local Souls, three novellas by Allan Gurganus, reviewed by Brian Oliu

Despite the fact that I have lived in the South for eight years, I would never consider myself “a Southerner,”—not out of the fact that I have any shame in making this statement: I love my adopted hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama & fully embrace its quirks as charm. When friends of mine from north of…
Bark, new stories by Lorrie Moore, reviewed by Kelsie Hahn

Lorrie Moore’s Bark is her first short story collection in fifteen years, but the author, while growing deeper in her craft, has not moved far afield from her previous obsessions. The stories have become darker and more haunted than those of Birds of America and Self-Help, now even with literal ghosts. The collection is best…
“The Straightforward Prose of Ben Marcus?”: Daniel J. Cecil Reviews Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus

When I joined Versal back in 2010, I was curious what other editors at the journal were reading. I was most interested in what Robert Glick, my fiction editor was intrigued by, and in response to my asking he gave two suggestions: read the Collected Fictions of Borges (which he kindly gifted to me), and devour…