How to Build a Home for the End of the World – Keely Shinners
When we are all sick, all the time (as we are now), and it is not seen as abnormal (as it is now), we can take care of each other. This is what capitalism desperately wants us to not do.
How We Are Translated – Jessica Gaitán Johannesson
In her debut novel, Johannesson brings forth discussions that have long existed (the experience of being between languages) as well as new ones (contemporary tensions over displaced people), joining the two under one specific idea: translation.
The History of America in My Lifetime – Brooks Sterritt
A satire of our data-driven societies, of modern surveillance systems, and of the irrationality of the Western world, it is a novel about capitalist America and our struggle to understand it.
Seçkin adds an interesting nuance by depicting how feelings of appropriation can play out at a more intimate, family level.
Dinner Party: A Tragedy – Sarah Gilmartin
Even if Sarah Gilmartin’s debut novel elicits inevitable associations with Irish intellectual and artistic heavyweights, this portrait of mourning and redemption stands on its own.
Suffering doesn’t actually have to be a prerequisite for having the right to be creating something, nor does anyone actually have a god-given directive to whittle their suffering into something to be offered up to a market.
Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies – Heba Hayek
What Hayek accomplishes with her debut collection is to transcribe the crisis of categorization that defines the Palestinian experience.
PERMAFROST isn’t the conventional, happily-ever-after fairytale-esque story . . . Baltasar shows that although life may be grim and cruel, one must carry on and entrust that there is a glimmer of hope to be found somewhere.
FOCAL POINT, like the Greek epics it frequently references, is thus an inner odyssey through illness and loss that imparts the difficult lesson that to live is to grieve.
Isn’t a life sentence without parole like a wrong word in a sentence that is impossible to correct, condemned to exist outside of grammar and syntax?