Category: Reviews & Criticism

Review: Annalia Luna on Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary

When it comes to writing, Asian women in America are given two choices. The first, of course, is the one where her exoticism oozes from her skin like bark slathered in sap, where she is delicate like dishes that only see food during holidays. She is an Asian woman with Asian parents who adore her…
Staying Alive, poetry by Laura Sims, reviewed by Jackson Nieuwland

As soon as I read the description of this book on the Ugly Duckling Presse website, I knew I had to have it: In her fourth poetry collection, Staying Alive, Laura Sims envisions the state of the world and of human existence before, during, and after the forever-imminent apocalypse. In channeling and sampling works of…
Gods in Neon, stories by Sam Slaughter, reviewed by Greg Marzullo

An adult son abandons his paralyzed father for a splash of Old Crow. A young widower, self-medicating with a stream of drinks, crafts macabre stuffed rabbits for his autistic son. A businessman goes to Key West for a work meeting and, after a wave of several cocktails, tastes the wondrous and insane glory of his…
Fiction Review: Mike McClelland Reads Matthew Binder’s High in the Streets

Matthew Binder’s debut novel, High in the Streets, is a risky novel, containing many of the elements that most writers are told to (and, it must be said, probably should) avoid. Writing about writing? It’s here in abundance. Shrill, oversexualized female characters? Check! An aimless man-child for a protagonist? Yep. It takes great talent and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…