What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings – John Lorinc
Compiling an anthology about possibly the most common food in the world practically guarantees an interesting mix of histories and perspectives . . .
Incendiary . . . an innovative subversion of the male gaze in a dark comedy packaging.
Weak in Comparison to Dreams – James Elkins
WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS [may] look like a recovery narrative, but it’s actually a re-cover-up story.
[Quintana] strips away the illusions that parents hold that they can just “cloak” their language or argue behind closed doors. Children see through it. They always have.
Mistaken for an Empire – Christine Imperial
“Where do you call home?” the world seems to ask . . . Imperial finds herself unable or unwilling to decide.
Tales of Tangier: The Complete Short Stories of Mohamed Choukri
Even in the stories that project a more lighthearted air . . . there is a looming sense that something is horribly wrong, that the party is over.
Always Crashing in the Same Car – Lance Olsen
[Olsen’s novel] doesn’t blur the lines between history and invention, fiction and nonfiction—it doesn’t recognize the existence of these lines in the first place.
A rich meditation on the burden of remembrance, the ruins of the past, and the ruins that climate crisis will soon bring us, Landscapes is a tightly woven debut that travels easily between epistles, point of view shifts, and art criticism.
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time – Sheila Liming
For a world currently crossing the threshold into climate apocalypse, hanging out as anti-despair, as an assertion of human dignity and value, feels revolutionary.
Love Chronicles of the Octopodes – Karen An-Hwei Lee
Emily D. is a biogenetically engineered entity gone wrong, somehow flubbed in the petri dishes and tubes of the “stardust editors of the Genzopolis,” thrown out like yesterday’s trash into a black hole that smells of honey and rhododendrons.