Natural Wonders – Angela Woodward
This novel could without serious distortion be called a love story, albeit more about the natural wonder of its absence than its presence.
Seventy-seven years later, Sarraute’s writing continues to unnerve and interrogate our readerly expectations.
As with all great works of literature, it is difficult to believe that so much can be contained by so relatively small a vessel. It is yet another reminder that while we live and breathe and read in a world bound by the laws of space and time, what lies within a book’s pages suffers limits of a different strain.
Oil and Candle – Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
Gabriel Ojeda-Sague describes and deploys ritual forms in order to undo the obscuring magic of privilege.
The Violet Hour – Katie Roiphe
The dust jacket promises to “help us look boldly in the face of death” but, after being given a tableaux even less diverse than Mad Men, how could it?
What is the equivalent, to a sixteen year-old American girl, of the irritating gentleman caller in the tall, lacquered hat?
A Lady and Her Husband – Amber Reeves
A LADY AND HER HUSBAND delves into generational differences, showing the ways that progressive movements depend on intergenerational communication.
Beasts You’ll Never See – Nate Liederbach
The stories in BEASTS YOU’LL NEVER SEE are prone to self-vexing. Each narrative dismantles its protagonist, draws and quarters him, splinters him into linguistic abjection.
Volpert is an Obama-supporting, married, gay educator, who, by her own definition, has had all of her eggs make it “safely into the misshapen hand basket of the American Dream.”
Stagg knows her strengths as a storyteller and continues to tell the story with lots of dialogue and minimal interiority instead of resorting to numbers, or to the pristine artifice of online forms such as screen-caps and chats.