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Beautiful Distractions: A Review of Shane Jones’ Crystal Eaters — Sebastian...
Shane Jones The world of Crystal Eaters, from its myths to its inhabitants’ futile struggles (to be remembered, to avoid death), mirrors so closely our plain old world, and all the more in its...
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The Experience of a Woman: A Review of Ingrid Winterbach’s The Elusive Moth —...
Author Photo: Leanne Stander The building goes up in flames, causing the protesters to scatter, and turning the attempt at damnation, at justice, into a bloodbath consuming not just those involved, but...
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Wind in the Birch Trees: Review of Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki...
The modulation is from the internal to the external, and the puzzles Tsukuru attempts to solve actually have answers. They draw Murakami away from his usual narrative tactic of ambiguity. Still, even...
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Ensnared in the Riddle of Their Doubleness: Review of F by Daniel Kehlmann —...
Brisk, utterly readable, yet with philosophical drifts drawing from Zeno to Kant to Baudrillard, F is a powerful, unassuming novel exploring the contours of absence and the hallucination of truth,...
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Talking With Animals/Speech Without Words: Review of Han Dong’s A Tabby-cat’s...
Remember heroic Buck from Jack London’s Call of the Wild or Lassie in Elizabeth Gaskell’s heart-wrenching short story “The Half-Brothers?” In Han Dong’s lean forty-three-page novella, A Tabby- cat’s...
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These Fictions, These Banalities: Review of Nicola, Milan by Lodovico...
The narrator depicts a Milan where everything is a carefully constructed series of symbols, never representing anything more profound than the artist who made them, the store they were bought from....
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Traveling the Inner Reaches: Review of It Will End with Us by Sam Savage —...
Photo by Nancy Marshall A common feature of the five prose novels is that Savage assumes, without being presumptuous, that what he wants to get across about interior states can be told, despite the...
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A Rapid Fire Life: Review of Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper — Benjamin Woodard
Photo by Fred Filkorn It is the kind of novel that sticks to the brain, that floats on neurons long after returning to the bookshelf… — Benjamin Woodard The Wallcreeper Nell Zink Dorothy, a publishing...
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Lovingly Damaged Language: A Review of Lisa Robertson’s Cinema of the Present...
Is it any good is the wrong question; how is it changing the terms of our enjoyment is the right one. Cinema of the Present is a threshold experience I pin brilliant. It bites the fruit it invents and...
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In the Palm Garden: Review of W. S Merwin’s The Moon before Morning — A. Anupama
The waning moon and a streetlight offered to help when I lost the silver pendant of my necklace walking my puppy in the early morning twilight. But after a moment’s search I let it hide, something...
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Constraints and Other Delights | A Review of Peter Turchi’s A Muse and a...
“…every well constructed piece of fiction has elements of a puzzle, and every piece of fiction that means to provoke readers to a state of wonder or contemplation has at least some element of mystery....
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A Place of Unlimited Encounters: Review of The Deep Zoo by Rikki Ducornet —...
Subversive at heart and acutely perceptive, The Deep Zoo celebrates the knowledge that “Nature loves order, the beautiful, and the anomalous.” It plies us to savor the spiritual and the scatological,...
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Portals Can’t Compete: Review & Excerpt of See You In Paradise by J. Robert...
It is impossible not to be intrigued by some of the plights featured in this or that story, thanks in part to the kinetic and assured momentum of the sentences and word choices, but thankfully, there...
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Essay as Not Knowing: A Review of Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio — Melissa...
D’Ambrosio has led us into a new sphere of understanding—that of our intimate human connections and what binds us together, all through intelligent narrative, or what he calls “scrappy incondite...
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Her Mother’s Keeper: A Review of Susan Paddon’s Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths...
This is a reminder that it’s foolhardy to demand like-ability or noble stoicism from our narrators, because one of the strengths of this book is Paddon’s depiction of Susan’s growth from a figure of...
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In the Orbit of Venus: A Review of Jay Rogoff’s Venera — Mary Kathryn Jablonski
…a book of love poems with a capital L. Yes, lover to lover, parents and children, but also love of – and honor, respect and compassion for – the earth and all it contains: art, music, birdsong,...
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A Choir of Pages: Review of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island — Frank Richardson
By allowing us to extend our perception to multiple images simultaneously, the image pattern creates a sense of multiplicity, a feeling of participation in a larger, more complex process than our...
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Masterpieces Can’t Be Willed Into Existence: Review Portrait of a Man Known...
Meaningless, nothingness, lack of understanding, and events sans repercussions. As translator David Bellos makes clear, this novel captures more than a taste for graphic death. It reflects a...
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Atrocities Proliferate: Review of Newspaper by Edouard Levé — Jason DeYoung
Few proper names appear in the book. No dateline attends the stories. Locations generally unspecified. It’s a newspaper, sans columns, a readymade novel, one event follows another. And like any daily...
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A Way Home: Review of Mai Al-Nakib’s The Hidden Light of Objects — Natalia...
Photo by Omar Nakib Perhaps the strongest element the author shares with her characters is the overwhelming desire to recreate and re-imagine the place where she grew up: a brave, cosmopolitan,...
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