Corey Fah Does Social Mobility – Isabel Waidner
Waidner dramatizes the knots into which society will twist itself to keep capital out of the hands of the disenfranchised.
The idea that I would have to be silent about an experience that I had because it would make other people feel uncomfortable . . . just felt obscene at a certain point.
Sister Golden Calf – Colleen Burner
One of the greatest joys of Burner’s novella is that classic feature of the road trip: not having any clue who or what you are going to run into next.
SCHOOL eviscerates post-structural conceits, derides the cult-leader-status of celebrity intellectuals, and denounces the academic pyramid scheme.
Paul Gottfried’s Career Smuggling Fascist Politics into the Academic Canon
With a figure as important to the American far-right as Gottfried, what excuse is there to lend him the veneer of academic legitimacy and to suggest his views have merit in scholarship?
No paean to Montreal’s transformation into a global capital of commerce and culture . . . [Bock’s novel] imagines one of the countless souls who built contemporary Montreal, giving their bodies for the city . . .
I thought to myself, I haven’t gotten better. I still have OCD. There’s no answer; there’s no resolution. The book is just going to be “this is my brain, this is what happens in my brain, the end.”
All the Way to Summer – Fiona Kidman
Particularly in those stories set in dismal small towns or isolated rural plots in mid-twentieth century Aotearoa (New Zealand), [Kidman’s] women long for escape: for a bigger, more liberated elsewhere.
Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home – Jessica E. Johnson
So much within these pages concerns the relationship between self and place, and between place and environment, what we do to it and take from it.
Sun’s first novel is very much its own book, but it invites comparison to Fyodor’s 1880 family-drama-cum-spiritual-murder-mystery, The Brothers Karamazov, so boldly that I think I’ll go ahead and compare them.