Letters to Kafka – Christina Estima
It’s a blaze of an affair, two intelligent people who deal with words
Traumatic Brain Novel: Debut Fiction from Esinam Bediako and Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
There’s a temptation, when we talk about illness and disability in fiction, to treat the body as either a tragic backstory or an inspirational obstacle course. These novels do something else.
My Dreadful Body – Egana Djabbarova
For Djabbarova, the body functions as a palimpsest of symbols
In this era of autocorrect, Lewis’s characters speak in typos
The Sleeping Land – Ella Alexander
Alexander reminds us that the human experience is bound to a rich history, and not just a matter of individual experience.
Natural History – Brandon Kilbourne
As much as natural history is a history of disappearances and extinctions, it is also a repository of evolutions and potentials.
The nose is not just cartilage and skin; it is inheritance, race, femininity, a mark of refusal, a repository of hatred and desire.
This narrative unmooring, while unconventional, strikes me as a byproduct of Jong’s departure from high-control religion
Now More Than Ever – Greta Schledorn
What Schledorn reveals isn’t a secret self but the impossibility of having one.
Sour Cherry — Natalia Theodoridou
Theodoridou […] takes readers beyond named characters like Agnes and Eunice, and largely beyond hope.