The Great Indoorsman – Andrew Farkas
It’s not culture Farkas is studying so much as the many interiors of the self.
Gentleman Overboard – Herbert Clyde Lewis
Standish bears the specific features of the gentleman — or a parody of it — in all its idiotic, self-regarding, and brutal composure.
The sparsity of text keeps the reader at a remove from Mara, as she is trying to keep herself at a remove from her own mind.
Revenge of the Scapegoat – Caren Beilin
Darkly comedic and wildly inventive, REVENGE OF THE SCAPEGOAT explores childhood trauma, medical exploitation, art making, and the ethics of fleeing our pasts.
To this gay, it comes as no surprise that a book called Villainy is about friendship. Queerness isn’t individual — it’s not something we can do on our own. We need each other just as much in the street as we do in the hot tub orgy.
Her enduring preoccupation with the permeable line between public and private, life and art, power and vulnerability, is on full display in The Hotel.
Self-Anointment with Lemons – Kristiane Weeks-Rogers
This book reminds us all of our collective past-what sustains us and what we can finally and gratefully release without forgetting.
None But the Righteous – Chantal James
While these canyons lead to Louisiana and through Hurricane Katrina’s pummeling, the overarching project of None But the Righteous is to situate this region and its most recent catastrophic event, within a wider and longer history of canyons and of pummeling.
Pilot Impostor – James Hannaham
The impostor sustains agency, decision, and responsibility. We pose. We become. We undo. We skirt expectations and evade labels. We reinvent and see the world in a new light.
From A Winter Notebook – Matvei Yankelevich
The friction against winter as constraint both shapes and animates the work.
The sparsity of text keeps the reader at a remove from Mara, as she is trying to keep herself at a remove from her own mind.
Philosophy of the Sky – Evan Isoline
For the readers who are keenly aware of their experiences of love, hatred and pain for, and fear of, the self, Isoline’s poetry will offer useful approximations of the vocabulary needed to meet them peacefully and poetically.
This experiential reading of the book is, in parts, created by what the blurb notes as Thúy’s “trademark style” which is “close to prose poetry.” And, like poetry, the book is economical and careful with words. Every sentence is a sensory jolt to the reader — heavy with meaning that must be unpacked and savored.
Men in My Situation – Per Petterson
The writer returns to the trauma every decade or so to see if this time his stunt man can catapult himself into the twenty-first century.