Category: Reviews & Criticism
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Fiction Review: Eric Nguyen Reads Sequoia Nagamatsu’s Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone
The fantastical has long been a part of American literature. From Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to the magical realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved—fantasy is American and its type of fantasy distinctly so. But today’s fantastical literature is different from what has come before. Writing for Electric Literature, author Amber Sparks dubs this…
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Fiction Review: Gint Aras Reads Nakamura Reality by Alex Austin
I am far from an expert on Japanese culture. While I’ve not yet had the chance to visit Japan, I have always been drawn to the aesthetics and themes in Japanese art, have felt a certain magnetism from Japan, and admire several Japanese writers, among them Natsume Soseki and Kenzaburo Oe. I also practice Zen in my…
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Nonfiction Review: Georgia Knapp on How I See the Humans by Gretchen VanWormer
In her essay “The Moths” Gretchen VanWormer states that she has a “tendency to see everything as a metaphor.” Throughout How I See the Humans, VanWormer expertly delivers on this statement with layers upon layers of deep, carefully crafted metaphors. Some of the metaphors are obvious: bat guano stands for the shit coursing through a…
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Fiction Review: R. Loveeachother Reads Davis Schneiderman’s Conceptual Novel INK.
Is this a riff on a Pollock drip painting? Is this a Rorschach test in ink splatters, rather than blots? A satire? A graphic novel? None? All? This concept novel aggressively resists review and conventional classification. What it is—or is not—INK. won’t say. Or, maybe it will, but certainly not on typical narrative terms. Disrupting…
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Fiction Review: Meghan Phillips Reads Your Sick by Elizabeth Colen, Carol Guess, & Kelly Magee
The title of Elizabeth Colen, Carol Guess, and Kelly Magee’s collaborative story collection, Your Sick, may at first seem like a grammatical error. In fact, a Goodreads user on the collection’s page asks, “Is the title intended to be ungrammatical? Are we supposed to read it as ‘You’re Sick?’” The confusion inherent in this question,…
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Daniel Falatko’s Condominium Blog Tour: Top Five
It probably says a lot about Condominium that none of the top five songs looming over the plot are by bands that ever existed. Whether this is an indicator of good things about the novel (“A cutting, surreal satire!”) or negative aspects (“What the hell is this thing even about?”) is up in the air,…
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Graphic Novel Review: Ryan Werner Reads The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found by J. Roselló
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. The titular Well-Dressed Bear of J. Roselló’s The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found doesn’t seem to ever finish reading his copy of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler. I myself read it almost a decade ago and remember almost nothing of it: ten…
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Book Review: John Vanderslice on Ben Tanzer’s Story Collection Sex and Death
With a title as provocatively Freudian as Sex and Death, a reader might expect a book of stories that never ends, or one that encapsulates the life of every person who has ever existed on the planet. Well, a concise, easily portable collection like this one (a mere seventy-two pages long) from Ben Tanzer is…
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Waste, a novel by Andrew F. Sullivan, reviewed by Robyn Ringler
Waste is a rapid-action unconventional novel that takes place over two days in 1989 in the fictional and economically dying town of Larkhill in southern Ontario, Canada. Larkhill is lined by porn stores, discount tax offices, and apartments patched with plywood windows. The twelve manufacturing plants that used to provide jobs are now gray lots…
Heavy Feather Review 