Category: Reviews & Criticism

“The One That Scares You Most”: Robert Crooke Reviews You Have Reached Your Destination by Louise Marburg

As implied in its title, Louise Marburg’s latest, award-winning collection features lives in transition. Each tale is a journey centered on a woman who appears at first to be secure in love, education, professional achievement, affluence, or all four. But we soon observe the intrusion of an unsettling personal experience or family issue previously held…
Birth of Eros, a novel by Debra Di Blasi, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

Size matters. I have yet to forget the first time I read those words, (and yes, in the exact context you’re thinking), back in the blissfully naïve early days of the internet, when the Nigerian Prince was literally the only scam we had to worry about, and chain e-mails were still kind of fun (kind…
A World Beyond Cardboard, a fiction chapbook by Jonathan Cardew, reviewed by Claire Polders

Jonathan Cardew’s collection of twelve tales is both an honest and an ironic dive into our humanity. In the marvelous title story, this ambiguity is obvious from the first sentence: “Mum died so dad took us on a holiday to France.” The family’s grief doesn’t stop life. On the contrary, the grief demands that they…
“Endless Hallways”: Laura Paul Reviews George Wylesol’s 2120

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Called a printed “point and click escape game,” George Wylesol’s new comic, 2120, shows how the influence of interactivity continues to exert itself in narratives, even on the page. Taking its form as an analog video game in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure, the book…
“The Alienation of the Long Distance Stalker”: Laura Paul Reviews Ali Raz’s Alien

Ali Raz’s newest book, Alien, is a novella about a hunter on the lookout for extraterrestrials in a city facing consistent destruction. For a quick read, it is not without its sharp risks and thrilling angles. In our time of heightened brutality, when friction is omnipresent, Alien hits the unlikely sweet spot of engaging enough…
With Different Eyes, an illustrated prose collaboration by Paul Smart & Richard Kroehling

With Different Eyes is a heart-stabbing book collaboration by the writer Paul Smart and the artist Richard Kroehling. The subtitle calls it “A Covid Waltz in Words & Images,” which doesn’t tell you much about this remarkable little volume. The pages are slightly wider than they are tall, and the narrative unfolds in very brief…
The Last Dinosaurs of Portland, a prose chapbook by James R. Gapinski, reviewed by Shyanne Hamrick

The Last Dinosaurs of Portland may immerse us in Portland, Oregon, but do not be fooled: the collection of ten short stories doesn’t linger there, not really. Instead, it is a surreal version of Portland comprised entirely of bridges—those “rusted footbridges that spiral out of your bedroom window and meander toward your ex’s neighborhood” and…
Disembodied, a book-length fragmented fiction by Christina Tudor-Sideri, reviewed by S. D. Stewart

In his fragmentary work The Step Not Beyond (State University of New York Press, 1992; translated by Lycette Nelson), Maurice Blanchot describes writing as “not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.” This concept of…
Dave Fitzgerald on Interrogating the Abyss, collected works by Chris Kelso

What is the abyss? Several years back, I went hiking in the Catskills with my now-wife, my childhood best friend, and his then-girlfriend in search of some unmapped swimming hole cliffjumps we’d heard about. The first one we came to was quite high, and quite narrow—a slim, deep canyon enclosing a complexly tiered waterfall. There…