Tag: Coffee House Press

Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Osvalde Lewat’s Novel The Aquatics

Osvalde Lewat’s debut novel examines the laws and social structure of Zambuena, the fictional African country within which The Aquatics takes place. Zambuena appears to be a thinly-veiled Cameroon, Lewat’s home nation; the fictional country and the real country have numerous similarities: a French colonial history, a Christian majority, ethnic diversity, and social restrictions, notably…
Adam Camiolo Talks to Celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan Author Pip Adam

Pip Adam is the celebrated New Zealand/Aotearoan author of four novels, including New Animals (2018), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and her latest, Audition, which was published in the U.S. by Coffee House Press in June. The novel is a profoundly strange but deeply moving exploration of life in the margins of society, the…
“Fingers at the Tip of My Words”: Alyssa Quinn on Sulaiman Addonia’s Novel The Seers

What’s the power of a paragraph? What does a paragraph do to the sentences it binds? A paragraph break, surely, is always ideological—it carries a meta-narrative about what is connected, what is disconnected. It sifts space and time into discrete, navigable units, seeding the text with white spaces like driftwood which we might grasp amid…
“Coupledom, Divorce, and Time’s Fluidity”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Eugene Lim’s Novel Fog & Car

Rife with love, melancholia, grief, and a supernatural hint, Eugene Lim’s debut novel Fog & Car is a psychological mindbender with the potential to reshape and redefine fiction. It follow Jim Fog, who after a divorce finds himself marooned in a small Midwestern town. Meanwhile, his ex, Sarah Car, seems to skip any regret or…
Fiction Review: Matt Martinson Reads Rikki Ducornet’s Novella The Plotinus

Forget “Call me Ishamel” and try on this opening line instead: “Agitated and pressed for time, I grabbed the knobby stick—a harmless memento of the footpath—now long gone—that had for a time provided access to the woods (such as they were) and ran into the street unprepared for the inevitable encounter (such a dope!) with…
Fiction Review: Ben Tripp Reads Tom Comitta’s Novel The Nature Book

Some will be familiar with the style of experimental writing found between these covers. “This novel contains no words of my own,” the author ominously portends in the book’s short, explanatory preface. “I have gathered nature descriptions from over three hundred novels and arranged them into a single book.” The aesthetic of collage, or, more…
Poetry Review: Josh Nicolaisen Reads Fighting Is Like a Wife by Eloisa Amezcua

In her second full-length collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua delivers a shockingly palpable recounting of the tragic relationship between boxer “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. The book shares its title with a 1983 Sports Illustrated article, which first highlights Chacon’s rise to fame and its effects on their…
Search History, a new novel by Eugene Lim, reviewed by Michael Wong

There’s a line in Eugene Lim’s Search History that is repeated several times throughout the novel. A character declares something they’ve heard impossible and their interlocutor quickly retorts: “Of course it isn’t.” And the matter, whatever it is, is simply left at that. It’s a refrain that tells us a bit about the characters involved,…
Pink Mountain on Locust Island, a debut experimental novel by Jamie Marina Lau, reviewed by Shyanne Hamrick

In author and music producer Jamie Marina Lau’s debut experimental novel, Pink Mountain on Locust Island, fifteen-year-old protagonist Monk lives with her “grumpy brown couch” of a father—a washed-up art teacher who spends his days watching nature documentaries, shouting game show answers, and catering to his budding Xanax dependency. When she meets artistic high school…