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.
A hypnotic novel, itself seemingly hypnotized by bodily fluids.
A Small Apocalypse – Laura Chow Reeve
Reeve’s imagined worlds are not habitable alternatives but critical comments on this one. Her idea of a refuge is not the infinite expanse of the interior self, but the tight-knit, embattled queer family in a hostile world.
She Is Haunted mixes elements of melodrama—the mother-daughter psychodrama above all—into a traumatic temporality in which the past is never-ending.
The Moon Over Edgar – Ian Felice
This collection advocates for attention to dreams, the uncanny, the mundane, and the moon as if now is the time to devote ourselves to that possibility rather than, like Edgar, letting our life pass before us.
An interesting consequence occurs in the titular tale, when time seems to proceed not along any linear or standardized path, but according to the Minke Whale’s appearance, disappearance, reappearance.
Lucky Breaks – Yevgenia Belorusets
LUCKY BREAKS lives within [a] precarious zone of intermittent warfare, teetering on the proverbial knife’s edge, anxiously anticipating Russia’s now-realized escalation.
trans(re)lating house one – Poupeh Missaghi
It is rare I encounter a work that is so formally perfectly realized of itself that it is almost painfully exciting to read; the space of the page becomes increasingly charged from the precise and repeating shapes.
The present is where Castro relishes his attention, but it’s a present layered with memory and subjectivity.
Everything is Totally Fine – Zac Smith
If there is one thing Smith’s time capsule of Americana can teach us is to listen to our dreams and nightmares and allow them to prompt new ways of living.