Category: Reviews & Criticism

“We’re All Renting an Experience”: David Harrison Horton Reads Anthony Tao’s Poetry Collection We Met in Beijing

Anthony Tao is a well known figure in Beijing. He’s the coordinator of Spittoon Beijing (an English language writing collective) and a part of Poetry x Music Band which has released an album and accompanying poetry booklet. We Met in Beijing is Tao’s debut poetry collection. The book is divided into four sections, which are…
Poetry Review: Saturn Browne Reads Kinsale Drake’s Debut Collection The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket

Kinsale Drake’s debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, chosen as one of the 2024 winners of the National Poetry Contest by Jacqueline Trimble, span across themes of family, legacy, colonialism, femininity, and mythology, with many poems set in the American South/Southwest. Through her imagery and linguistic choices, Drake makes a radical…
Fiction Review: Jacob M. Appel on Seth Rogoff’s New Novel The Castle

Franz Kafka’s unfinished final novel, The Castle, stands out as the most sophisticated and elusive of the author’s abstruse and infinitely generous corpus. The enigmatic tale relates the tribulations of the land surveyor, K., summoned in error to a Central European village governed by the inept bureaucratic retainers of Count Westwest. A century after Kafka’s…
Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Douglas J. Penick’s Vikram-Vetala Retellings The Oceans of Cruelty

Oh great king, this world we traverse together is, as you know, a sea of cruel desires and insatiable deceits. Let me distract you with stories from another place and another time. The Oceans of Cruelty is a reinterpretation of the Sanskrit epic, the Vetala Panchavimshati, which spans twenty-five parables told within a framing narrative,…
“… and they were unafraid”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Roz Dineen’s Debut Novel Briefly Very Beautiful

In an apocalyptic world where fires ravage acre upon acre of land and the globe has entered a perpetually hot summer, a young mother struggles to make the correct decision about moving her children to one of the few unscathed remnants of countryside remaining. Meanwhile, the skies in the City turn orange with toxins, and…
Fiction Review: Vanessa Saunders Reads Annell López’s Collection I’ll Give You a Reason

Annell López’s first book, I’ll Give You A Reason, is masterclass in writing about people on the margins. The winner of the 2023 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize from Feminist Press, this short-story collection delves into themes of exclusion on the grounds of citizenship, race, and mental illness. Set in New Jersey, a haunting sense…
Fiction Review: Hantian Zhang Reads Yuxin Zhao’s Novel The Moons

On the first page of The Moon: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, Yuxin Zhao states her aesthetic outright: she values fragments more than structure, digression more than destination. The book can be read as a compilation of diary entries, scattered tiny life episodes ordered chronologically and grouped by zodiac signs. Together, in the space outlined…
“Binging an Untitled Original Series Set on Multiple Continents”: Shane Joaquin Jimenez Reads Rupert Taylor’s Novel Please Let Me Destroy You

Reading Rupert Taylor’s riotous, polyphonic debut novel Please Let Me Destroy You is like watching light reflect off a disco ball, spinning radiant, ever-shifting constellations across your mind’s eye. At turns absurdist and psychedelic, the book is an often funny, often tragic, breathless litany of (in no particular order): panic attacks, heartbreaks, humiliations, betrayals, globetrotting…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Jillian Danback-McGhan’s Collection Midwatch

One of the stories in Jillian Danback-McGhan’s collection of short fiction, Midwatch, is set in the Gulf of Aden, where American troops are boarding fishing vessels, trying to catch pirates by searching for weapons and other evidence of illicit activity. Did you know the U.S. Navy did that? Any military veteran could casually talk about…