Category: Reviews & Criticism

Brat, a graphic novel by Michael DeForge, reviewed by Ryan Werner

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. For years now Michael DeForge has been building these fucked-up worlds that sit on top of and inside our own world all at once, as if there’s a dimension we can’t comprehend where we’re all just twigs or neckless shapes with the same problems of simply not…
The Book of Transparencies, a literary detective novel by Jefferson Navicky, reviewed by Laura Nicoara

The Book of Transparencies begins (or does it?) in 2005 when an unnamed narrator, an adjunct professor at a community college, comes across a “slim anomaly of a book with an ash blue cover” in the library. This is the (other) Book of Transparencies, written by William Bolzebados three decades before, an autobiographical “collection of…
Zuri Etoshia Anderson Reviews The Death Scene Artist, Andrew Wilmot’s debut novel

What makes an actor? Do they have to have star-studded fame, perfect teeth and a reputation for great acting? Or do they have to be closet catastrophes, marred by drugs, relationship issues, anxiety and identity crises in order to create their stardom? Why not both? Andrew Wilmot addresses these types of questions and more with…
Leonard Temme Reviews Laura Catherine Brown’s Novel Made by Mary

Made by Mary is an intimate, compelling, tightly plotted, enjoyable novel about an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship. The mother is the fifty-five year old Mary. The daughter is the thirty-year old Ann, the name shortened from Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment. Well before the novel begins, the daughter rejects her exotic name for…
White Dancing Elephants, short stories by Chaya Bhuvaneswar, reviewed by Wendy J. Fox

Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut White Dancing Elephants reads less like a first book and more like a master cartographer’s map of terror and heartbreak. In the seventeen stories in this collection, Bhuvaneswar chronicles the disrupted lives of her characters, often punctuated by loss and betrayal—and sometimes violence. White Dancing Elephants has been reviewed well by the…
The Alehouse at the End of the World, a novel by Stevan Allred, reviewed by Michael A. Ferro

Featuring a motley crew cast of misfits well-suited for a Monty Python-esque romp of mythical proportions, Stevan Allred’s new novel, The Alehouse at the End of the World, is a tale fit for our troubling modern times of tyrants, travails, and turmoil. Set in the fantasy world of the Isle of the Dead, our hero…
Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, a flash fiction collection by Nancy Stohlman, reviewed by Hillary Leftwich

If you’ve ever stood and stared at yourself in a funhouse mirror and saw yourself as someone you don’t recognize, distorted or with two faces, then you have a pretty good idea of how Stohlman’s latest collection of oddities takes you through the gambit of freakshow possibilities in each of her stories. Stohlman, a performer…
Perpetua’s Kin, a novel by M. Allen Cunningham, reviewed by Laura-Gray Lovelace

There are books that take more time to read, not because the plot isn’t interesting enough, characters not engaging, or life gets in the way, but because they are full of powerful scenes that demand to be meditated on before moving on to the next. Perpetua’s Kin, by M. Allen Cunningham, is one of these…
“Mon Cher Apollinaire”: Jordan A. Rothacker’s Death Day Letter to the Father of Surrealism

November 9, 2018 Mon Cher Apollinaire, It has been one hundred years to this day since you left us. Since I was a young Joycean—a generally weird-bookish-kid who at seventeen joined the International James Joyce Foundation, wrestling with angels and giants beyond his grasp and understanding—I have found your name intriguing, your poem “Zone” enchanting,…