Category: Reviews & Criticism

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,…
Micah Zevin Reviews Ruth Danon’s New Poetry Collection, Word Has It

The word has insurmountable potential and power to guide readers on and through a seemingly endless but ultimately finite voyage. Word Has It, Ruth Danon’s latest poetry collection, is a philosophical three-section, chapter-book prose poem, where, Word, its main character—whose thoughts and narrative are italicized—is a kind of literary, film noir-ish detective searching for everything…
Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales, Orrin Grey’s third short story collection, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

“Upstairs, the chair waited, with its bloody hooks and screws, and he knew exactly who it waited for.” —from “Guignol” by Orrin Grey Rarely is it possible to say that a short story collection manages to not only taxonomize, but diligently explore, the massive, fractal landscape of the horror genre without forsaking its unifying…
All That Man Is, David Szalay’s fourth novel, reviewed by Ray Barker

British author David Szalay’s latest novel—a term which doesn’t capture Szalay’s unique approach to the genre—is a restless, schizophrenic thing. Divided into nine sections featuring nine different men of at least six nationalities, set in approximately thirteen countries, the canvas Szalay covers is impressively wide. The men range in age from seven to seventy-three, and…