Category: Reviews & Criticism

  • Stories from the Attic, previously unpublished work by William Gay, reviewed by Dawn Major

    Stories from the Attic, previously unpublished work by William Gay, reviewed by Dawn Major

    After William Gay’s passing in 2012 a mountain of unpublished work was discovered and Team Gay—a group of artists, authors, professors, scholars, basically uber fans— was formed. I came into the picture while writing my master thesis in 2016 and I reached out to the archive for more in-depth information on Gay’s writing. After I…

  • Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    Anybody Home? a horror novel by Michael J. Seidlinger, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    It’s sometimes disturbing to think about the ways in which traditions evolve. Nothing, after all, starts out as a tradition. The word, by definition, carries in it the implicit understanding that an idea or act has happened a number of times, across a lengthy period, with some level of sustained intentionality. Human civilization functions around,…

  • Ancestral Throat, a chapbook of poems by Danny Rivera, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

    Ancestral Throat, a chapbook of poems by Danny Rivera, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

    “Dis–”, a prefix of negation, but also of an absence or removal, serves as the backdrop of Danny Rivera’s debut chapbook Ancestral Throat, an ecclesiastical elegy to his father and primal hymn to human origin. Discharged arias, dismantling chapters, discolored diaries, distended crowns, a dismissed choir: Rivera sings the pain of impermanence as the dying…

  • In Memory of Memory, a novel by Maria Stepanova, reviewed by Sylwia Jurkowski

    In Memory of Memory, a novel by Maria Stepanova, reviewed by Sylwia Jurkowski

    Organized chaos … or chaos that becomes slightly organized while the rest of it remains unbound. Surrealism’s allowance of the mind to wander into the illogical, to bathe in it, only to find the clear, unmistakable logic within. Let’s take the most basic definition of the word “memory” from Merriam-Webster, “the power or process of…

  • The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    The Autodidacts, a novel by Thomas Kendall, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

    There is a passage in what I have come to think of as, gun to my head, my all-time favorite novel—Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—wherein a character complains to his therapist that he thinks he might be going mad, only to be met with the following response: “No Leland, not you. You, and in…

  • “Dangerously Close”: Alyssa Quinn on Nina Shope’s Novel Asylum

    “Dangerously Close”: Alyssa Quinn on Nina Shope’s Novel Asylum

    Some books refuse to leave you unscathed; they draw you in, grip you tight, and when you get out—if you get out—you will remain forever marked. Nina Shope’s Asylum is such a book. An innovative work of historical fiction, Asylum tells the story of Louise Augustine Gleizes, a young woman diagnosed with hysteria by the…

  • “Creating a Possible Self”: Natalie Wee’s Beast at Every Threshold Reviewed by E.B. Schnepp

    “Creating a Possible Self”: Natalie Wee’s Beast at Every Threshold Reviewed by E.B. Schnepp

    Beast at Every Threshold is not a collection that invites us in gently, holding our hand while we explore the world, but it is one that rewards us for taking the time to find our way in. The collection is a challenging read, equal parts devasting and delighting, defying all attempts at categorization; Wee reinvents…

  • Lovebirds, a flash fiction chapbook by Hananah Zaheer, reviewed by Jordan Terry

    Lovebirds, a flash fiction chapbook by Hananah Zaheer, reviewed by Jordan Terry

    How many ways can a heart break? Hananah Zaheer aims to find out in her debut short story collection Lovebirds, which explores the complications of “love” and the hardship and chaos that comes with the raw emotion. In the collection, Zaheer’s female characters’ responses act as catalysts for radical change and Zaheer manages to wring…

  • Red Is My Heart, a collaborative novel by Antoine Laurain & Le Sonneur, reviewed by Jordan Nunes

    Red Is My Heart, a collaborative novel by Antoine Laurain & Le Sonneur, reviewed by Jordan Nunes

    To publicly share the details of life post-breakup would be an embarrassment for most people, but Red Is My Heart does not explore disturbing details about the relationship or the breakup. Instead we are taken into the mind of a man as he meanders through the trivial, often delirious, times of his suffering. This is…