Category: Reviews & Criticism

Fiction Review: Tyler Barton Reads Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World

The final story in Ottessa Moshfegh’s third book of fiction starts with the sentence, “I come from another place.” If Homesick for Another World contained an opening epigraph, this might be an apt one. To be clear, the collection is not a work of speculative fiction, nor is it sci-fi, fantasy, or even magical realism.…
James Ardis Reviews Exits by Daryl Seitchik

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. When I first heard about Daryl Seitchik’s comic Exits, the story of a woman who works at a mirror store until she achieves (or is cursed with) full invisibility, I felt confident I knew where the story would go. I figured Claire, the now invisible protagonist, would…
“I, Too, Am Ruining My Own Life”: Jesse Rice-Evans on Gwen Werner’s I’m Ruining My Own Life

Gwen Werner gets me: anxieties about gender, sexuality; being a total nihilist but loving my nest anyway; trying to not be an awful straight-passing feminist; surviving, but barely. Werner stumbles through life, but her voice is unwavering: she might hate herself, but she knows how to shape a story, and, maybe most importantly in short-form…
Fiction Review: Ray Barker Reads Alexander Boldizar’s The Ugly

Even courageous readers have likely never encountered a character with the overwhelming physical mass and intellectual presence of (northern) Siberian oaf, and oversized tribal chief, Muzhduk Ugli the Fourth. Muzhduk is the three-hundred-pound blond-bearded protagonist that propels Alexander Boldizar’s oddly unforgettable debut novel, The Ugly, to its fairytale end. The novel ostensibly details the life…
There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, stories by Michelle Ross, reviewed by Dana Diehl

The stories in Michelle Ross’ debut collection, aptly named There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, are fueled by grade school science, by snake venom, by fossilization, by velocity, by the kind of magic that’s real. Ross’ characters live in half-formed worlds, their vision limited by their circumstances. In these twenty-three stories, characters stare down…
Poetry Review: David Welper Reads Ben Mirov’s A Few Ideas from My Blackbox

Question: if you’re in a life-or-death situation, what would be the thoughts—no, ideas—going around in your head? Or, as Ben Mirov asks in his latest chapbook, A Few Ideas from My Blackbox, “Can you imagine a whippoorwill?” Mirov’s chapbook presents poetically ideological and existential questions in literal and figurative spaces. Each poem is short (one…
Book Review: Melih Levi Reviews Tiana Clark’s Equilibrium

Could it be magic?The white bunny we lift from the hatlike early fog on the road to work.(“Particle Fever”) To get through. To get through the day, the night. That miserable winter. Grief. All of that. To get through to you. What does it mean to get through? What does it mean, through? Does…
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…