Category: Reviews & Criticism

Rooted, the best new arboreal nonfiction edited by Josh MacIvor-Andersen, reviewed by Miranda Schmidt

Recently, Portland, my home, was covered in a layer of ash and smoke from nearby wildfires in the forested Columbia Gorge. Wildfires are common in the west but this year’s intensely hot and dry summer has created conditions that mean, as we inched towards fall, it felt as if the whole of the west coast…
We Could’ve Been Happy Here, debut story collection by Keith Lesmeister, reviewed by Ray Barker

The characters in Keith Lesmeister’s debut short story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, are populated with men stuck in the painful middle-distance of life, haunting the rural and lonely locales of the Midwest, the Iowa small towns serving as a microcosm of their weary worldview. The parameters of the physical geography are clear: fading…
Flowers & Sky, lectures and unpublished poems by Aaron Shurin, reviewed by Daniel Casey

Every poet is unconsciously dominated by particularities. There is a moment in the writing life of most when they come to realize not just their habits or style but also obsessions and predilections. It is a moment when a writer sees their work from the outside. Often, this will lead to self-imitation or, to put…
The Hour of Daydreams, a novel by Renee Macalino Rutledge, reviewed by Melissa McDaniel

No matter how well we think we know someone, it is never truly possible to fully understand another person. Within the complex maze of the human soul, there will always be unknown corners and hidden chambers. In The Hour of Daydreams, Renee Macalino Rutledge examines this struggle between intimacy and closeness through a lens of…
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…