Reviews

Kairos – Jenny Erpenbeck

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With Kairos, Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.

Perma Red – Debra Magpie Earling

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While set in the 1940s, Earling’s engagement with the complexities of reservation violence rooted in the traumas of settler colonialism and modern capitalism, make the story of Louise White Elk as resonant as it was when the novel was first published in 2002.

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City – Jane Wong

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What does it mean to be a good immigrant daughter? What does it take to be regenerative, resistant, and nostalgic?

Standard American English – Elisabeth Houston

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Houston refutes language, or at the very least refuses to be authored by it.

A History of the Island – Eugene Vodolazkin

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Looming large in the minds of the citizens is a prophecy of final doom by Agafon the Forward-Looking, recurring in moments of political instability.

I Feel Fine – Olivia Muenz

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When disabled writers are often expected to display the most personal aspects of their bodies for the consumption of able-bodied readers, Muenz rejects self-objectification in favor of a deeper form of seeing and being seen.

Hervelino – Mathieu Lindon

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For an elegiac work, Hervelino has little in the way of lamentation or solace. “Death was there, there was no theorizing it or solving it.”

Concerning My Daughter – Kim Hye-jin

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Tightly structured, carefully crafted . . . no word, symbol, metaphor, or nuance is wasted.

A Cigarette Lit Backwards – Tea Hacic-Vlahovic

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I was, in my own JNCO ways, very much like Kat and maybe you were, too.

Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche – Vi Khi Nao

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Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche is brutal—so brutal that one wonders how its author survived to write it.

She Is Haunted – Paige Clark

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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

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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.

Kairos – Jenny Erpenbeck

by

With Kairos, Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.

A History of the Island – Eugene Vodolazkin

by

Looming large in the minds of the citizens is a prophecy of final doom by Agafon the Forward-Looking, recurring in moments of political instability.