To live as myth is a form of resistance.
Bats of the Republic – Zachary Thomas Dodson
Dodson seems to ask: why have we left the pages of books so dry when we can do so much?
The Mark and the Void – Paul Murray
Murray pulls off the impossible. He writes a funny, poignant, human, and philosophical novel about an investment banker.
B., like many other white members of her zeitgeist, cannot embrace her cultural present, so she tries to pilgrimage back in time.
I want poetry to till and tilt. I want it to renew and restage difficult questions from unexpected perspectives.
Paulina & Fran – Rachel B. Glaser
In Paulina & Fran we see young women eager to shed conventions but ceaselessly drawn into their current when it comes to the ways humans traditionally relate to each other: with jealousy, longing, pity, hatred, love.
Beauty Is A Wound – Eka Kurniawan
The concern takes us back to the original question: genre-based marketing labels risk reducing the individuality of books and flattening them into kitsch. But I’d like, hesitantly, to argue back: isn’t this only true if we think of magic realism as an ossified thing?
If James Bond is a sharply-dressed state-sponsored killing machine, Jason Bourne is his moral opposite — the machine gone haywire, resisting its programming.
Gold Fame Citrus – Claire Vaye Watkins
[Gold Fame Citrus] speaks to the part of me that sees a drained lake as more than a localized crisis affecting only a handful of fish, and wonders about the texture and shape of the greater crisis that an event like this portends.
There are writers who can really unravel a sweater with slow deliberate style, but, if anything, I must underwrite. I’m always trying to get out of explaining or defining anything.