A sharp, tunnel visioned interrogation of what happened and happens to Harchi, her family, her neighbors. The “we” she uses in the title and in the text could be a “we” of her family unit, but also of second-generation North African immigrants, all suffering racism in France.
The Night Flowers – Sara Herchenroether
Cancer is not just a disease within the body . . . it affects perceived notions of what it means to live and die, and how one chooses to do so.
Daybreak at Chavez Ravine – Erik Sherman
If you go searching for a story and come up empty, do you still write the book?
As humans . . . we seem destined to look for patterns—which, to me, is another way of saying we’re on the hunt for “explanations.” Life is scary. We need all the help we can get to get through it. Biographical accounts, as often as not, seem to function as cautionary tales.
The Telaraña Circuit – Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola
When one tunes into the frequencies of this “telaraña circuit,” one polishes one’s antennae, seeking to distill symbols from the living text of the world.
Love is deep underground with her speaker’s heart, begging the question: If the soul is hiding, how can there ever be enough love?
Form doesn’t merely shape content, but creates it. This is a scary fact. Language threatens the freedom of things, making complexity seem fixed and turning loved ones into abstractions.
How might the stories of different characters tangle, or explode on contact, or narrowly miss each other, but create vibrations nonetheless?
The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu – Augusto Higa Oshiro
With his passivity resulting from the weighty history of deprivation and discrimination, what are the conditions for the possibility of Nakamatsu’s enlightenment?
The Narrow Cage – Vasily Eroshenko
All of these characters, whether human or otherwise, are connected in their subjection to both nature’s and humanity’s whims.