Category: Reviews & Criticism

Review by Joe Sacksteder: Mount Fugue, a hybrid novel by JI Daniels

As a pianist who has played many a fugue in my time, I’m sometimes annoyed at the default the corollary many critiques draw between difficult works of literature and the fugue. The “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses, for example, is not fugal. It’s more of a bloated overture with the opening section representing the instrumentalists warming…
“Stranger Territories”: Matthew Phipps Reviews Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest

The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George’s audaciously good debut collection of fiction, opens, significantly, on the occasion of a birthday. At the beginning of the first story, “Guidance / The Party,” the unnamed narrator, newly thirty-three, is visited by a figure she only knows as The Guide. Spectral and robed, of indeterminate gender, The Guide…
Gabino Iglesias Reviews The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

An interesting thing happened in literature recently, and not for the first time. Most readers were looking at Big Five publishers and waiting for something written by someone in New York that resembled the next great American novel. Meanwhile, readers plugged into Tyrant Books, one of the best indie publishers in the world, were reading…
Review: Robert Young on Han Yujoo’s Novel The Impossible Fairy Tale

If there’s one word that can be used to describe Han Yujoo’s novel, The Impossible Fairy Tale, it would be unique. Yujoo’s first novel published in English by Graywolf Press is a tour de force and totally unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The world of The Impossible Fairy Tale is dreamlike, and the way that…
Review: Nick Sweeney on Found Audio by N.J. Campbell

N.J. Campbell’s Found Audio is the new Pandora’s Box of weird contemporary fiction. It forces the reader to grapple the very reason they are reading this slim but dense novel. It begs to be read. It questions itself. It haunts us. Most importantly, however, it makes the reader think about the very thin line between…
Robert Young Review: Jac Jemc’s Novel The Grip of It

If you’re like me and are a big fan of psychological horror, you’ve been craving a book like The Grip of It. Jac Jemc’s novel is pitched as a “literary horror novel,” and it blurs many lines. As a psychological horror novel, the book blurs the line between the natural and the supernatural, what is…
Review: Nick Sweeney on The History of the Future by Edward McPherson

I made the mistake of reading The History of the Future before I went to bed. It was a mistake not because of anything Edward McPherson said in particular, it was the mere notion of thinking of place. I thought about my hometown, of minor celebrities who went to the local high school, the nearby…
Nonfiction Review: James Ardis on Kingdom Hearts II by Alexa Ray Corriea

In the final hours of the Square Enix game Kingdom Hearts II, a bad boy named Axel sacrifices himself in the middle of an overwhelming battle. He swings his weapon and summons fire until he falls in exhaustion. As he dies next to Sora (our protagonist) with Donald Duck and Goofy not far behind, Axel…
Poetry Review: Lucas Pingel Reads Matt Mauch’s Bird∼Brain

In the first lines of Matt Mauch’s third collection of poems, titled Bird∼Brain, he compares a songbird to “an estate sale ad/ packed with so many implausibly well-kept/ treasures”. The same could also be said for the poems in this book, which are packed to the brim with imagination, and dazzling in their linguistic and…