Category: Reviews & Criticism

“His Name Is Jonas”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Joshua Chaplinksy’s Novel Letters to the Purple Satin Killer

In November 2023, a BU Today opinion piece posed a pertinent question: “Why are we so obsessed with serial killers?” Three Boston University-affiliated experts weighed in on the topic, one that came into focus after police arrested Rex Heuermann, a man accused of killing three woman whose bodies were found on Long Island’s Gilgo Beach…
Novella Review: Mark Crimmins Reads Ashley Honeysett’s Fictions

Rumors about the death of autofiction have been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, claims—in Publisher’s Weekly and elsewhere—that there is no such thing as an autofictional novel (or novella) are themselves less redolent of fact than of fiction. Ashley Honeysett’s genre-bending hybrid novella Fictions is a sign that, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, autofiction…
Nonfiction Review: Jen Schneider Reads Kat Meads’ These Particular Women

It’s a particular type of writer and a particular type of writing that illuminates (ten-fold over ten essays) as much as it informs. It’s also a particular type of writing and a particular type of writer that uncovers details (oh-so-delicious details) as much as it declares and reveals universal truths. These Particular Women, written by…
“When the Horrors at Home Are Scarier Than Any Monsters”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Darrin Doyle’s Novel Let Gravity Seize the Dead

Darrin Doyle’s Let Gravity Seize the Dead invites us into a new kind of psychological horror, one that relies on brevity and compression to create the subtle scare tactics that keep us engrossed. Within the novel’s 141 pages, we uncover a trauma-laden story that examines the past, the present, and the myriad of ways one…
Poetry Review: Gina Thayer Reads Jenny Irish’s Poetry Collection Hatch

If you were to open my copy of Jenny Irish’s prose poetry collection, Hatch, you would find margins filled with penciled half-thoughts and doodles of anatomically dubious fireflies. I’m not usually one to mark up a book, but Hatch works in mysterious ways, subtly shifting how we interact with the world. Through linked prose poems…
Fiction Review: Adam McPhee Reads Scott Mitchel May’s Novel Awful People

A reunion of a group of friends looms on the horizon of Awful People, the new novel by Scott Mitchel May. The friends, whose lives once loosely revolved around employment at the Antiquated Brewing Company in Madison, Wisconsin, haven’t seen each other since 2009, their ties shattered after one of their number developed LSD-induced telekinetic…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Rikki Ducornet’s Novella The Plotinus

Forget “Call me Ishamel” and try on this opening line instead: “Agitated and pressed for time, I grabbed the knobby stick—a harmless memento of the footpath—now long gone—that had for a time provided access to the woods (such as they were) and ran into the street unprepared for the inevitable encounter (such a dope!) with…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ben Tanzer’s Novel The Missing

Parenthood can be rife with worst case scenarios, all of them truly the worst. It’s a state I was blissfully unaware of when I was a young father still set in youth’s phase of invincibility, but now that I’m a grandfather, I often worry about higher stakes. All those potential worst cases now hovering around…
“A Field Guide to Our Precarious Hive”: Robert Glick Reads Shena McAuliffe’s Short Story Collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness

Shena McAuliffe’s third book, the inventive and quietly powerful story collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness, acts as a field guide to characters who devote themselves to systems of belief—a business model, a pseudo-science, a taxonomy of the body—at odds with their lived conditions. The friction between the imaginary and the real, however, isn’t particularly…