Code of the West – Sahar Mustafah
Here are two representations of the country: One insisting unimaginatively as to what it takes to obliterate the nuances of social difference with blunt force, and the other just trying to get by.
At some point in your life, something will fall in front of your feet that you did not expect. There’s a challenge that MAMMOTHER offers the reader: to believe, simply, in what you are about to read, and then to risk reading it.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby – Cherise Wolas
Through Joan’s writings we see what Joan refuses to — that she has not and cannot inoculate her writing from her life; that her art and her life are symbiotic.
Goodbye, Vitamin – Rachel Khong
The way that Ruth gauges the progression of her father’s illness is food-centric.
Wong’s speakers are possessed of a transforming power, but the physical realities around them push back, or bind them in ways they can’t escape.
Swallow the Fish – Gabrielle Civil
Civil upends our assumptions around artistic displays of the body, demands we consider the fact that performance art engages with unruly ghosts and wounded riddles.
OROGENY generates mountains; dynamite destroys them. The cycle is complete; the circle closes. Or perhaps not.
The Knack of Doing – Jeremy M. Davies
In fiction, it’s more fun when the watch, after pages and pages of diligent ticking, explodes, starts screaming, or shoots poop out of its dial — does something, anything, to upend the pattern or upset the conceit.
Bodies of Summer – Martin Felipe Castagnet
At its best Castagnet’s debut work artfully skirts overt philosophizing about mind-body relations and necropolitics, keeping this slim speculative novel at an athletic pace and leaving ample room for us to explore its marvelous world for ourselves.
The Vine That Ate the South – J.D. Wilkes
THE VINE THAT ATE THE SOUTH is more conversion narrative than odyssey, and more tall tale than either, filled with a twisty, tongue-in-cheek lyricism that calls to mind a Weird Twain.