Category: Reviews & Criticism

A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, stories by Steve Gergley, reviewed by Kassie Bohannon

In A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair, Steve Gergley provides several perspectives on the titular experience, including everything from epic battles between man and God in the desert to surreal in-between moments where a couple fights to revive passion while also fighting for their eternal souls. There are hilarious moments with unprofessional dentists, sorrowful…
The Year of the Horses, a memoir by Courtney Maum, reviewed by Shannon Wolf

For Courtney Maum, The Year of the Horses followed a period of intense internal struggle. A crisis of identity as her daughter turned two brought on a bout of depression and insomnia so significant, it caused her life—and marriage—to stall. She found herself at a crossroads and needed to take the right path—and being a…
“The Mystery of Growing Up”: Robert Crooke Reviews When Me and God Were Little by Mads Nygaard

In this complex and personal novel, dedicated to his father, Mads Nygaard spins a web of mysteries around family secrets, religious obsession, and psychic unrest in a bleakly rugged Danish setting. It is Nordic fairy tale, social history, and Danish-Lutheran parable in equal parts. And a wondrous narrative featuring innocently cynical observations by a seven-year-old…
Music Is Over!, a novella by Ben Arzate, reviewed by Carl Fuerst

In 2013, I visited my brother in NYC, where he’d moved to pursue a career as a chef. I was a lifelong Midwesterner, and I imagined that the New York City subways wouldn’t be much different than the Red Line in Chicago. But this was fundamentally different. Before the pandemic began, nearly 5.5 million people…
“Sometimes You Wanna Go Where Nobody Knows Anybody’s Name”: Dustin Holland on Steve Aylett’s Hyperthick #1

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Picking up a piece of Steve Aylett’s work for the first time is always a confounding experience. His prose and his comics are often inscrutable blends of genres and mediums that wear their influences proudly on their sleeves while being unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered. The…
I Failed to Swoon, a poetry collection by Nadia de Vries, reviewed by Fani Avramopoulou

Nadia de Vries’ I Failed to Swoon is a slim collection of poems that are by turns playful, brutal, and aloof. The poems in this collection are short—some of them no longer than Tweets. Much of the language invokes tropes of internet speech: droll one-liners, self-assured aphorisms, jaded indifference, and cliché. de Vries unsettles the…
La Serenissima, a poetry collection by Wallace Barker, reviewed by Donald Ryan

Wallace Barker’s La Serenissima from Gob Pile Press. 19 chapters. 19 vacations. Each poem a single sentence, less than a page, recounting moments in instances. Like photographs in a family album, the poems are souvenirs. You may not know the people in the picture or what’s taking place in the background, but within each frame…
Condemned to Cymru, a novel by M.J. Nicholls, reviewed by Eric Williams

M.J. Nicholls’ new novel Condemned to Cymru is Rabelaisian in every sense of the word: it’s gross, it’s droll, there’s sex and violence and jokes. It even affects the Rabelaisian flourish of an artificial structure—the story is mostly presented as one pathetic misanthrope’s alphabetized travelogue (of sorts) of Wales, written for a sinister Icelandic thinktank…
Begat Who Begat Who Begat, short stories by Marcus Pactor, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Marcus Pactor’s sophomore short story collection, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, explores the deceptively complex topics of mundanity and domesticity through experimentation in both rhizomatic storytelling and narrative form. Over the course of the collection’s 122 pages, Pactor presents 17 stories situated just left of reality. Across varying subjects, such as a toilet that transmutes…