Category: Reviews & Criticism

The Book of the Last Word, a novel by Jesi Bender, reviewed by Patrick Parks

In the prologue to Jesi Bender’s intense and beautifully crafted first novel, The Book of the Last Word, we hear from that most omniscient of narrators, who tells us, “In the beginning, there was nothing but me. In the end, it will be the same.” This paraphrasing from Genesis is a tip-off that behind the…
Hannah Jackson Reviews Wendy J. Fox’s latest novel If the Ice Had Held

In Wendy J. Fox’s If the Ice Had Held, Melanie faces a setback when the software company she works for begins downsizing. At the same time, she is also trying to overcome her impulse to sleep with married men, reflecting on her childhood and realizing where her avoidance of commitment stems from. While the novel…
Temper CA, a novella by Paul Skenazy, reviewed by Hayley Neiling

With the death of her grandfather, Joy Temper returns to the small mining town of Temper, CA. Temper is the town where she spent her childhood in the 1970s, and it is the town that her family founded during the days of the California gold rush and has gained local fame for doing so. In…
Survival House, a story collection by Wendell Mayo, reviewed by Eric Aldrich

Survival House, a new collection of short fiction by Wendell Mayo, invites readers to experience the ironic fetishization of the Cold War in America. The collection blends compelling characters with borderline absurd imaginings of the Nuclear Age ethos. Mutually assured destruction hovers in the background as atomic diction is repurposed into dad jokes with a…
Not Everyone Is Special, Josh Denslow’s debut fiction collection, reviewed by Michael A. Ferro

If there’s one resounding message to be found in Josh Denslow’s debut collection of stories, Not Everyone Is Special, it’s just that: Not everyone is special, but enough people are and Denslow has created a world filled with winners, losers, and everyone in-between—each with their own engrossing stories and each told with the care and…
Sunsphere, a new story collection by Andrew Farkas, reviewed by Paul Albano

Sunsphere, Andrew Farkas’ second collection of experimental short stories (after his brilliant, and brilliantly named, Self-Titled Debut) is set in, around, and underneath Knoxville, TN. But not the Knoxville that exists in the collective hunch we recognize as reality. Instead, this is a surrealist rendering of the city—the Knoxville of our dreams and nightmares and…
Mannequin in the Nude, a poetry collection by Logan February, reviewed by Barton Smock

… My story was much too long, soI cut it to bits. —from Portrait of The Mannequin as my Brother … Forinstance, homoerotic. For instance, a boy who eats glass. —from Boy Lolita … When I died, I stopped trembling. Imagine a mechanicalboy being powered down. —from Ars Moriendi ~ With a lyric that pushes…
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…