CHRONOLOGY is a polyvocal text, a poetics of archive. The act of reading feels akin to debriefing with a friend. The impulse to help pull it together collectively.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers – Jenn Shapland
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY cracks the normative bounds of literary scholarship and shows us what kind of knowledge production is possible when the researcher drops the veneer of “scholarly objectivity” and makes herself fully present in the research process.
Whiteout Conditions – Tariq Shah
WHITEOUT CONDITIONS is a book concerned with toxic masculinity’s erasure of the self; it’s walls and moats.
Imaginary Museums – Nicolette Polek
Polek allows her characters — and therefore herself — to face the fear of futility that lurks everywhere in her exhibits. But there is a real grace in this devastation, too. Alongside the grace, stories like these provide that fizzy tincture of strangeness and humanity that every reader I know lives for.
In this first outing, McCombs struggles toward spiritual frenzy, struggles toward total casualness, struggles toward artificial grace.
The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary – Molly Reid
Which animal is on the brink of rapture?
I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood – Tiana Clark
Figurative language reaches towards the physical embodiment of feeling, animating words on the page.
Socialist Realism – Trisha Low
Maybe this is, more than anything else, about a series of starting points. We have not started fighting yet.
Mostly Dead Things – Kristen Arnett
What Arnett’s debut aspires to is the act of holding, tightly and gently all at once, to the mostly dead things, and not letting go.
Exquisite Mariposa – Fiona Alison Duncan
Its first bites taste like mainstream contemporary fiction; they go down easy, like candy, or like a Sally Rooney novel. But as you continue to chew — because this novel is chewy — you encounter something quite different.