Review

Garments Against Women – Anne Boyer

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What’s the difference between wide hope and desperation? I was trying to hold everything together, all at once.

The Dirty Dust – Máirtín Ó Cadhain

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There are no philosophers or historians in the dirty dust, only gossips and fabulists.

Lurid & Cute – Adam Thirlwell

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Thirlwell’s achievement is in creating a character who is difficult — nay, impossible — to like, and yet, like Humbert Humbert, propulsive.

Eileen – Ottessa Moshfegh

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The prose does quick, good work. But it’s an uncomfortable consciousness to inhabit for long, sad-making and stomach-turning.

The Vorrh – Brian Catling

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Dreamlike and horrifying, The Vorrh is permeated with an ominous power.

Oreo – Fran Ross

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Ross’s novel offers readers an unending stream of snort-worthy punchlines with implicit boundaries for who can access this story and how they can.

Slab – Selah Saterstrom

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Saterstrom gives voice to one of the American untouchables. It’s a complicated, beautiful, whimsical, troubling, and heart-breaking voice.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat – Helen Phillips

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The Beautiful Bureaucrat revels in its playful and dark take on contemporary life, and yet never loses sight of its commitment to the brazen, and perhaps stupid, curiosity of the human.

Sundogz – Mark von Schlegell

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A theatrical production of Shakespeare’s Pericles utilized the brain waves of its performers to project a poetic spectacle, a dreamlike, semi-unconscious generation.

Infinite Home – Kathleen Alcott

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In the city, there is no dearth of lonely and broken people; Alcott’s skill lies in fitting these fragments together.