Category: Reviews & Criticism

Vivian Wagner on Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s latest novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretations of J.Crew Catalogues

Elizabeth A.I. Powell’s new novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretations of J.Crew Catalogues, uses the worlds within and around the pages of J.Crew catalogues to imagine a convoluted story of desire, nostalgia, storytelling, and consumerism. The novel alternates between sections told from the points of view of a variety of characters in the J.Crew orbit,…
Micah Zevin on Brendan Lorber’s if this is paradise why are we still driving?

Can we ever escape the hidden meanings of existence, the state of saying or doing one thing and meaning another? What to make of the silences, the pauses, fissures, elisions, we find in conversation or on the page? What can be mined from what’s missing? How will the gaps or empty spaces be filled if…
“History Repeats and Stories Become Complete”: Fabulations, minimalist short stories by José de Piérola, reviewed by Mark Crimmins

José de Pierola’s Fabulations is an impressive and deeply stimulating collection, one that explores a diapason of forms and modes as it slyly reinterprets the implications of its title. Fabulism, late in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is one of the favored modes of a new generation of writers who have moved on…
Our Pool Party Bus Forever Days, short stories by David James Keaton, reviewed by Jason Teal

Never mind that his introduction of best car chase cinema (“Gasoline Dreams”) is worth the price of admission, David James Keaton is a bizarrely prolific writer who gets slept on beyond our genre congregation, and this is the world’s biggest shame. I’m here to expose the wrongdoings of we vapid readers, and to provide recognition…
Killing Poppy, a novel by William Perk, reviewed by Paul Dee Fecteau

When we tell stories about addiction, two well-worn narratives hold sway. In one, addicts personify failure, debasing themselves in the face of the glory of the American Dream. In the other, they embody nobility, struggling against a darkness not of their own making. In Killing Poppy, published in September by Apocalypse Party, William Perk savages…
Zuri Etoshia Anderson Reviews On the Bitch, a summer flash novella by Matt Potter

What does it mean to have a stable marriage or romantic relationship? What does it mean to be a parent? What is it like to be a citizen in a foreign country? Matt Potter addresses these themes and more with his summer novella On the Bitch. Hugh, a middle-aged English teacher to immigrants, and his…
“The Devil in the Details”: History and Myth in Lee Klein’s JRZDVLZ, a review by Jesi Buell

“Whoever languishes in thoughtful reenactmentof the past falls prey to cruel beasts.” —Lee Klein In his latest novel, Lee Klein introduces the Jersey Devil (JeRZey DeViLZ) as a sympathetic beast living across hundreds of years in the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey. The novel blends archival fact with longstanding myths, which serves to both amplify…
“Cults, Monsters, and Strange Rites” for Haunted Passages: On The Void and the Cosmic by Sean Oscar

Previously, I discussed a film described by some as ‘Lovecraftian’. I rejected this designation, observing that ‘for a text to be truly Lovecraftian, it requires more than cults and monsters and strange religious practices—it requires existential dread’. Here, I shall discuss a film that does meet this designation, and I shall explain why. But, further…
“The Roadmap to Escape the Inferno”: Jason Teal Reviews Candice Wuehle’s Poetry Collection BOUND

Too often presses aspire to publishing on the basis of reaching an audience and having an impact on letters—and everyone tries to sell books the same way—all while passing the claim that subverting our expectations and experiences comes second, or postmortem, to artmaking. Too often this quality of art goes unremarked on more deeply than…