Tag: MG Press

  • A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, an essay collection by Anna Prushinskaya, reviewed by Vivian Wagner

    A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, an essay collection by Anna Prushinskaya, reviewed by Vivian Wagner

    Anna Prushinskaya’s collection of essays, A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, interrogates the meaning and experience of womanhood and motherhood. She looks at the blurry, liminal boundary between these two states and tries to come to terms with the fact that there’s no simple, reliable definition for either one. Prushinskaya is,…

  • WE COULD’VE BEEN HAPPY HERE, debut story collection by Keith Lesmeister, reviewed by Ray Barker

    WE COULD’VE BEEN HAPPY HERE, debut story collection by Keith Lesmeister, reviewed by Ray Barker

    The characters in Keith Lesmeister’s debut short story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, are populated with men stuck in the painful middle-distance of life, haunting the rural and lonely locales of the Midwest, the Iowa small towns serving as a microcosm of their weary worldview. The parameters of the physical geography are clear: fading…

  • John McCarthy’s GHOST COUNTY

    John McCarthy’s GHOST COUNTY

    Don’t be deceived by John McCarthy’s debut collection, Ghost County. The book’s slim size and meticulous organization can lull the unguarded reader into thinking that they are in for a quick indulgence, a one-sitting flick through a stereoscopic tour of the American Midwest. The imagery is well-rendered but familiar, and emotion is referenced, but the narration…