Mistaken for an Empire – Christine Imperial
“Where do you call home?” the world seems to ask . . . Imperial finds herself unable or unwilling to decide.
Tales of Tangier: The Complete Short Stories of Mohamed Choukri
Even in the stories that project a more lighthearted air . . . there is a looming sense that something is horribly wrong, that the party is over.
Always Crashing in the Same Car – Lance Olsen
[Olsen’s novel] doesn’t blur the lines between history and invention, fiction and nonfiction—it doesn’t recognize the existence of these lines in the first place.
I have been asking myself this a lot lately, of my past year: What genre am I in? Is this horror? A tragedy? A comedy? All of it?
A rich meditation on the burden of remembrance, the ruins of the past, and the ruins that climate crisis will soon bring us, Landscapes is a tightly woven debut that travels easily between epistles, point of view shifts, and art criticism.
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time – Sheila Liming
For a world currently crossing the threshold into climate apocalypse, hanging out as anti-despair, as an assertion of human dignity and value, feels revolutionary.
Lucky Over There: Meeting the Greek Translator of Breece D’J Pancake
Perhaps, without realizing it, a part of me had begun to wish Pancake’s fame had never grown beyond the depths of the library where I found him, to wish his brutal brilliance was a secret known only within the state borders.
Love Chronicles of the Octopodes – Karen An-Hwei Lee
Emily D. is a biogenetically engineered entity gone wrong, somehow flubbed in the petri dishes and tubes of the “stardust editors of the Genzopolis,” thrown out like yesterday’s trash into a black hole that smells of honey and rhododendrons.
I envy so much people who are able to edit, destroy, sculpt. Sometimes I worry I explode onto the page, and what may seem like stylistic choices are really just my overeagerness and inability to complete my own thoughts.
Natsumi knows she’s bored, but she keeps trying to convince herself that boredom is comfort, safety, and happiness. In actuality, boredom is the closest thing to Natsumi’s identity; it’s what she’s “about.”