I did not read Made to Break: I traversed it; I imbibed it; I rode it, like a wine-dark wave.
Descriptions of the rural landscape mirror those of the characters’ inner lives; it is barren and brittle, then gives way to wind and fire on a moment’s notice.
The Bend of the World – Jacob Bacharach
The sentimental conservative view is that the educated are taught everything but belief. The Bend of the World inverts that proposition. We are taught belief in art, institutions, personas, and higher planes of existence.
[Niceties] is the rare exception in which the term poetic used to describe fiction isn’t hyperbolic. The stories feel like prose poems because they operate according to associative logic and sonic pleasures.
What Ends pulls at past and future, as the out-of-sequence sections zoom in on certain years on the island and the events that ultimately lead towards an uncertain future for both the island and its last inhabitants.
Exorcism is just a lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Today, not only is the personal political, the personal is celebrity.
Narcissus and Ego: Poets Try the Novel
Ben Lerner’s LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION and Dan Beachy-Quick’s AN IMPENETRABLE SCREEN OF PUREST SKY are grand narcissistic projects. But if that sounds like a slight, you haven’t listened to these books.
Everything Happens as It Does – Albena Stambolova
The stories of a handful of comingling lives unspool with the beguiling sense of fatedness that overtakes all events once they’ve happened the way they’ve happened to happen.
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail – Kelly Luce
I would happily suggest that Luce contributes as much to the contemporary renaissance of the short story in her first work as Russell, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders have with their recent masterpieces.