Debut Books

Restless Continent – Aja Couchois Duncan

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The speaker, a person split between Ojibwe and European lineages, is uninterested in narratives that paint the colonization of the North American continent as a sentimental tale of innocence lost and civilization found. How would the earth remember?

Three New Story Collections, Five Ways

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Mainly I want you to finish the review thinking things like, Hm, maybe I should read that book, or Maybe I won’t read it, but at least I have a clear sense of it! (And, most important of all, Wow, that guy knows a lot about the New York Mets!)

Mischling – Affinity Konar

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What really saves MISCHLING is Konar’s astonishing lyricism. Against Adorno’s statement, here there is poetry in everything.

The Girls – Emma Cline

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Please take a moment to appreciate the perfection of the phrase “cuff of trapped blood.”

The Reactive – Masande Ntshanga

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He is an HIV-positive person for whom HIV is operating, surely, as a metaphor.

The Lightkeepers – Abby Geni

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The same non-intervention the biologists practice on the island — not to leave a human mark on the fragile ecosystem and thus to merely observe, even when a baby animal is dying and could be saved by a small push in the right direction — is extended towards each other.

Problems – Jade Sharma

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PROBLEMS is hypnotic and dank, an intimate gurgle from a person to whom you have become so endeared you decode it. And you know it’s beautiful.

One Hundred Twenty-One Days – Michèle Audin

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In fact, the historian admits defeat.

You May See A Stranger – Paula Whyman

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While I was reading YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER by Paula Whyman, I kept thinking about Carrie Bradshaw and my adventures in accidental homewrecking, and how Whyman’s protagonist Miranda Weber is, on paper, an utter mess in a way even Carrie would never let herself be.

Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute

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Seventy-seven years later, Sarraute’s writing continues to unnerve and interrogate our readerly expectations.