Category: Reviews & Criticism

“Tell It Slant”: Shannon Nakai on Recollection and Reality in Melora Wolff’s Essay Collection Bequeath

“Before she opened the book, and before I entered this picture, I did not know that love is a deed …” So culminates the themes of Melora Wolff’s latest essay collection, Bequeath, published by the Louisiana State University Press. Part ode to a father figure who is a loving, enigmatic storehouse of imagination, part unflinching…
Fiction Review: S. D. Stewart Reads Samuel M. Moss’ Novel The Veldt Institute

“Of course, the Veldt Institute is not commonly known—likely no one outside the Veldt Institute is aware of its existence—but it is clear that those who arrive do so at the exact time that is best for them.” This is not a review, per se. It is more a series of impressions and associations meant…
“The River Inside and Out”: Dave Karp on Matt Trease’s Poetry Collection The Outside

When I think about what it truly means to be an engaged writer, I think about writers who confront the world from some set of principles: Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, communist, or socialist, through an indigenous belief system or some other source of precepts and strictures. Matt Trease is just such an engaged writer,…
Nonfiction Review: McKenzie Watson-Fore Reads Gabriella D’Italia’s Debut Memoir Getting Dressed in the Dark

The crisis that catalyzes Gabriella D’Italia’s debut memoir, Getting Dressed in the Dark: An Artist’s Way Home, is a gruesome separation and divorce, when D’Italia learns that her partner of twenty-two years has been cheating on her with her much-younger coworker and friend. However, Getting Dressed in the Dark is much more than a divorce…
“The Axis Rewinds”: Thomas B Revisits Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend’s Mythic Essay Hamlet’s Mill in an Age of Fragmentation

I didn’t go looking for Hamlet’s Mill. It found me—during a season of psychic weather when everything in my life felt dislodged, the usual maps no longer worked. I had drifted from most of my routines, including reading. But this book, pulled from a dusty shelf by accident or fate, offered a different kind of…
Fiction Review: Kevin McMahon Reads Alexis Von Konigslow’s Novel The Exclusion Zone

Chernobyl. The name itself conjures a range of emotions and images, and my own intrigue in this infamous disaster was more than sufficient to pique my interest in giving this particular title a read. There’s a fantastic German word for the overwhelming sense of unease that’s palpable throughout—unheimlich—literally, “unhomely,” or the exact opposite feeling of…
Fiction Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Jesi Bender’s New Novel Child of Light

“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s probably safe to presume that anyone reading this site with any regularity knows this line by heart. As the first of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, it sits comfortably close to the top of the ranks for most famous first lines in…
Fiction Review: Jason K. Friedman Reads Devin Jacobsen’s Story Collection The Summer We Ate Off the China

The academy has long been suspicious of literary language, considering the very concept of a privileged mode of expression privileged in other ways: elitist, exclusionary. These days fiction writers seem to agree. If they aren’t in fact autofiction, the stories you read in, yes, elite literary publications mostly try to sound as if they’re just…
Nonfiction Review: Alexandra Grabbe on Julie Masis’ Memoir How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe (And Survived the Holocaust in Ukraine)

At a moment in world history, when fascism seems to be rearing its ugly head again, the time feels right for yet another plunge into the past. Unfortunately, most people tend to forget what previous generations lived through. This is why I chose to read How My Grandfather Stole a Shoe (And Survived the Holocaust…