This Should Be Written In the Present Tense – Helle Helle
Translator Martin Aitken has beautifully captured Helle’s streams of laconic sentences, many of them beginning with “I” plus a verb, that build to create this accumulation of sensory detail. Taken together, they accumulate into a compelling, rhythmic pattern.
On this Wedding D-day, the characters are balanced on a precipice: Will they move toward a revolution and remake the social order? Will the authoritarian regime hold things together? Or will absolutely everything come crumbling down?
Rather than falling into conventional narratives, eco-fiction needs to underscore the need for traditional environmentalism to question its own positions of privilege and provide a space for imagining non-normative paths to sustainability if it is to inspire genuine social justice.
Is The Vegetarian, devastating as it doubtlessly is, funny? The question feels almost perverse to ask, but only because the novel begins in the brilliant tradition of high, scrambling Kafkaesque comedy and then turns sharply away.
Complicated Grief – Laura Mullen
[Laura Mullen] adopts a new way of speaking about grief in every single chapter of this challenging work.
Drone and Apocalypse – Joanna Demers
[DRONE & APOCALYPSE] is in part a delineation of a secular, nihilistic faith, a faith that can rely only on worldly beauty for its unifying force.
Walsh uses the twister as both a propelling incident in the plot and a pattern for how the book will progress, making the structural choice feel necessary, as the form and the content merge to create an immanent sense of disaster.
Matches: A Light Book – S.D. Chrostowska
Matches is not a prescription for how to think, but an incitation that you think.
With his skilled take-down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, Montes’ Perfect Days is a worthwhile, pleasantly creepy English-language debut.
Grand Menteur – Jean Marc Ah-Sen
I’m torn between thinking Grand Menteur somewhat messy and unfocused, and comparing it to the dizzying effect of a merry-go-round — you can almost catch hold of images as you pass, but never fully.