Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Adam Camiolo Reads Percival Everett’s New Novel James

I am a man who is cognizant of his world, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related but self-written. With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. James, the titular character of Percival Everett’s twenty-fourth novel, writes these…
Fiction Review: Brianna Kale Reads Jacqueline Vogtman’s Collection Girl Country

In Jacqueline Vogtman’s beautiful, poignant, and haunting short story collection Girl Country, we are invited to explore the female experience in the modern era through the lens of magical realism and a sprinkling of historical fiction. The stories carry strong feminist themes and universal truths that effortlessly blend with nervy craft. Vogtman strikes the perfect balance…
“Some Kind of Monster”: Stephen Meisel Reads Dave Fitzgerald’s Novel Troll

The trashed halls of pop culture are littered with Slenderman copypastas taken to horrific conclusions and jokes turned into career-threatening scandals. Yes, it’s true. These days, we have a lot of trouble figuring out just how seriously we should take anything—anything at all. Enter Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll, an encyclopedia of cringe, the novel no one…
“Art is never just”: Peter Valente on Touching the Art, a memoir by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

In Touching the Art, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore examines her complex relationship with her grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore, and the ways in which she impacted her own ideas about what it meant to be an artist; in doing so, she examines the legacy of racism in Baltimore, her own coming out as a queer…
“Style & Symptom”: K Hank Jost Reviews Jinnwoo’s Novella POLO

Between two burning fields, in a dying industrial village, a child’s sprint toward a coming-of-age is about to be chopped at the knees. The development of our unnamed, laconic narrator, alongside his soon-to-be ex-best friend, has fallen into the hands of a rotating gaggle of older boys. These wayward teenagers, engaging in self-harm, early drug…
Poetry Review: Kevin Gallagher Reads The Pearl Diver of Irunmani by Marc Vincenz

Sometimes you can swim with your eyes closed and learn something. You almost have to close your eyes and get ready to breathe into Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani. If you dive in with your eyes open they will sting and you can’t see a thing. The book is organized into six different movements,…
Poetry Review: G.H. Mosson Reads Anders Carlson-Wee’s Second Poetry Collection Disease of Kings

Within the realm of narrative poetry, Anders Carlson-Wee’s second full-length book features two purposefully unemployed, dumpster-diving male best friends, who live at the fringes of American consumer culture in a nondescript apartment, and embody a sort of DIY punk rock esthetic of not working and living off the abundance tossed into dumpsters. Told through characters…
Fiction Review: Shyanne Hamrick Reads There Is Only One Ghost in the World by Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller

Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller’s There Is Only One Ghost in the World may have found life in the middle of a pandemic, but their collaborative book doesn’t steep in the tedium of socially distanced landscapes. These two writers instead tie a balloon to the narrative and gaze at contemporary America from a bird’s-eye view…
Book Review: Nadia de Vries on Jeffrey Grunthaner & Kenji Siratori’s Paracelsus’ Trouble with Sundays

If you were to put the Internet on paper, what would it look like? Perhaps this is a redundant question in 2023. The Internet has not been a separate mode of being since at least the early 2000s: it has long permeated everything we think and do. Media theorists like Nathan Jurgenson, Matthew Fuller, and…