Category: Reviews & Criticism

If This Should Reach You in Time, poems by Justin Marks, reviewed by Jeanne Griggs

If This Should Reach You in Time, by Justin Marks, is a collection of poems related by feelings of isolation and by the perception of failure in the systems we depend on, natural and political. If the news about school shootings, fake news, and migrant families has made you feel unsettled, these are poems for…
“Guns on the Roof”: Peter Valente Reviews The Survivalists, a novel by Kashana Cauley

They torture all the women and children Then they’ve put the men to the gun Because across the human frontier Freedom’s always on the run —from “Guns on the Roof” by The Clash Kashana Cauley’s novel The Survivalists deals with questions of race, class, and the problems of late capitalism in a story that revolves…
Dr. No, a satirical spy novel by Percival Everett, reviewed by Adam Camiolo

Dr. No, the satirical spy novel by Percival Everett, is uncommonly funny, ridiculously smart, and has a serious score to settle. It is, in short, quite good. The book follows the misadventures of Professor Wala Kitu, a theoretical mathematician whose name is Tagalog and Swahili respectively for Nothing Nothing. Wala specializes in Nothing, an abstract…
“An Angry Bull Loose in a Video Store”: Jesse Hilson Reviews Steve Gergley’s Novel Skyscraper

Anyone who has shown up for a new job at a large, intricate organization and tried to get their bearings in the workplace will be able to relate to the germ of the idea behind Steve Gergley’s new novel Skyscraper. A 23-year-old man named Dan Simmons’s would like to play video games and watch action…
“self-evident and completely incomprehensible”: Austin Miles on Evan Isoline’s Insensible Text DƐVDMVTH

Insensibility invokes an opening. What’s insensible is ungriddable, unseizable, or unknown, even in plain sight. The inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, writing on insensible nature, says that it is “that which appropriates sense without being sensible to appropriation.” She draws on Georges Bataille’s notion of insensibility: “a form of animality which opens up a depth that…
Beasts of 42nd Street, a new novel by Preston Fassel, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

I didn’t pick up my first Stephen King—The Shining—until 2016, but boy did he buy up a ton of early real estate in my young mind. An eight-year-old screening of the edited-for-TV Kubrick film was basically my intro to horror as a concept, and my favorite aunt and uncle were King superfans. I still remember…
“Art Is Life and Life Is Art”: Peter Valente on Tell Me I’m an Artist, a new novel by Chelsea Martin

Chelsea Martin’s novel, Tell Me I’m an Artist, is a coming-of-age story about a young artist, Joelle Berry (Joey), living in San Francisco and studying at an unnamed Art School, as she confronts her own complex feels about what it means to create meaningful art while balancing the problems that she left behind in her…
Brontosaurus Illustrated, a graphic novel by Leanne Grabel, reviewed by Cathy Smith

A violent kidnapping and rape at the age of nineteen created a Brontosaurus-sized trauma in Leanne Grabel’s life. In the accordingly-titled Brontosaurus Illustrated, she tells her tale in vivid words and drawings to explain how this trauma has lived with her for more than fifty years. Though slightly fictionalized, every single word of this book…
Book Review: Francois Bereaud on Faith, a novel by Itoro Bassey

Nigeria is a vast country with a rich literary heritage. Award winning authors including Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have influenced writers and readers across the globe. Now, with her debut novel Faith, the Nigerian-American writer Itoro Bassey announces herself as one of the next voices in this powerful tradition.…