The relinquishing of niceness is a difficult task, especially if you have been socialized into it forever. Learning how to be small took all of my girlhood, learning the opposite will take all of my adulthood.
Conglomeration only seems to be accelerating . . . we need to understand how it impacts what we read and how we read it.
Liquid Snakes – Stephen Kearse
[Kearse’s hero] has been hurt by the carefully constructed cruelty of capitalism and doesn’t so much want to lift the veil but set it ablaze.
Where the Wind Calls Home – Samar Yazbek
The drama of recent Syrian history—the reign of the dictatorial Assad family, the brutal civil war begun in 2011—plays out in the struggle of one single consciousness trapped in its gears.
Jewish Authors Critical of Zionism
Jews across the diaspora . . . have been vocally demanding a ceasefire and organizing to take action. They are part of the long Jewish tradition of criticizing Israel and Zionism, which has existed as long as the idea of Israel.
Where Furnaces Burn – Joel Lane
Lane seems to be claiming that there’s something fatally false about the industrial landscape, which appears natural but in fact is inimical to life. He warns, too, against worshipping machines that comfort us even as they kill.
You don’t have to know anything about hockey to feel that Wendt does: they write it gorgeously, in prose thrumming with the rhythm of coordinated movement.
THE LONG FORM is about how a person lives with a long novel: in between the domestic motions of her day, Helen is reading and considering the form of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones and the origins of the English novel form generally—a distracted preoccupation, an interiority in relationship with the material demands of her day.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman – Patricia Melo
While violent fantasy is cathartic, it does not bring about justice. That, the narrator comes to realize, is found elsewhere.
kochanie, today i bought bread – Uljana Wolf
It’s a testament to Nissan’s work as a translator that this collection of Wolf’s poems offers an abundance of doorways for English-language readers. You don’t need to be steeped in the history of German poetry to engage with this book deeply and powerfully.
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
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.
Where the Wind Calls Home – Samar Yazbek
The drama of recent Syrian history—the reign of the dictatorial Assad family, the brutal civil war begun in 2011—plays out in the struggle of one single consciousness trapped in its gears.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman – Patricia Melo
While violent fantasy is cathartic, it does not bring about justice. That, the narrator comes to realize, is found elsewhere.