Category: Reviews & Criticism

The Gloaming, a novel by Melanie Finn, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Good writers conjure characters from the dust and ink. Great writers can resurrect them. Melanie Finn can certainly drag a character through the gauntlet, a skill that remarkably few writers can do with the precision shown often in her most recent novel, The Gloaming. With intertwined narratives, we see the results of failure and the…
Dana Diehl’s Our Dreams Might Align, reviewed by Eshani Surya

We assume we are closer to other people than to nature. Maybe because we congregate in cities, maybe because we have perpetuated myths about how unlike animals we are. In Our Dreams Might Align, Dana Diehl challenges our notions of separation/connection, particularly in regards to the natural world. Diehl’s universes are ones of magic and…
“Listening to the Reverberating Voices in Algaravias: Echo Chamber by Waly Salomão”: A Poetry in Translation Review by Jayme Russell

“I swim in the great open book of the world.” —Waly Salomão In Algaravias: Echo Chamber, Waly Salomão’s writing contains a multitude of references, or echoes, other writers, languages, and stories from around the world. He includes modern voices like Wallace Stevens and Paul Celan, but running throughout the book is an underlying retelling…
Hoopty Time Machines, fairy tales for grown-ups by Christopher DeWan, reviewed by Eric Andrew Newman

It’s very fitting that Christopher DeWan, the author if the new book Hoopty Time Machines, lives in Los Angeles. After all L.A., or La La Land as it’s also known, is the land of dreams and fairy tales. In his previous book, Working and Other Essays, there’s an essay in which DeWan references the permeability…
Fiction Review: James W. Davidson, Jr. Reads Heavy Metal by Andrew Bourelle

In Andrew Bourelle’s 2016 Autumn Press Fiction Prize-winning novel, Danny is a loss survivor haunted by the gruesome scene he discovered. His mother committed suicide with .44 Magnum, and he was the first to find her horrific remains. Memories and the last image of her, along with the absence of a caring parent, torment Danny.…
Big Lonesome, short stories by Joseph Scapellato, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Joseph Scapellato’s collection is a lot of things: risky, honest, and romantic. Big Lonesome will turn your idea of the Western genre on its head, creating new thoughts, before turning again, and again. Cowboys and Indians and horses and the dust of the Old West and the New. And the weird. Especially the weird. I…
James Ardis Reviews Jarett Kobek’s Soft & Cuddly

Soft & Cuddly (1987) and its predecessor Go to Hell (1985) were horror games published on cassette tapes for what is now an obscure British computer system. The games were proudly the products of a teenager’s boredom and embraced the label “Video Nasties” that was used in the 1980s by Britain’s elite to damn subversive…
Book Review: Zachary Kocanda on Chelsea Martin’s Novella Mickey

The epigraph for Chelsea Martin’s novella Mickey is a lyric from the song “3 AM” by Matchbox 20: “It’s all gonna end and it might as well be my fault.” It’s an appropriate introduction because pages later, the narrator breaks up with her boyfriend, the titular Mickey. Yet this VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the…
Everything We Don’t Know, essays by Aaron Gilbreath, reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Aaron Gilbreath’s Everything We Don’t Know is a collection of essays about growing up, coming to consciousness, and taking responsibility for one’s actions and inaction. These intimate and honest essays tell stories about mistakes Gilbreath makes and harms he inflicts, and ultimately they’re also about his slow and winding journey toward compassion and care. Not…