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.
What might be taken for granted as comfortable or soothing or beautiful in a novel that subscribes to bourgeois realism becomes intentionally alienating or disconcerting and potentially hostile in a novel about the subaltern.
Holland’s language is dizzying, decadent, erotic.
The Art of the Publisher – Roberto Calasso
The publisher is not dying, it is adapting in order to survive.
The State We’re In: Maine Stories – Ann Beattie
[Beattie’s] tenth short fiction collection urges this existential observation: that the homosexual and heterosexual acts are not equivalent; only the latter is the terrifying, potentially co-creative, real thing.
My Wet Hot Drone Summer – Lex Brown
Using the cloak of the erotic novel, which historically has been seen as light entertainment and even farce, Brown’s discussion of body politics, privacy, and surveillance feels remarkably subversive — even as it remains in-your-face, as pornographic text tends to do.