In a world with no chill, Dynamo Island is nearly all chill.
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing – Brian Blanchfield
[Blanchfield] thus recalibrates the Cartesian cogito as a statement of uncertainty that lies at the basis of our being: I mistake, therefore I am.
“I’m turning into a human skeleton!” was particularly resonant and touches on what I think to be Agony’s universal appeal.
The Fishermen – Chigozie Obioma
THE FISHERMEN is less an allegory than a story about our desire to fit the past into one.
Studies in Hybrid Morphology – Matt Tompkins
Matt Tompkins’ Studies in Hybrid Morphology might be perused as a codex of potential trans-human identities.
The 7th Man – Melanie Rae Thon
“Someone has to die so that the rest of us shall value life more,” said Virginia Woolf, and Thon deftly animates this theorem.
OBLIVION’s task is a vital one: to recover Russia’s collectively repressed memories of the prison labor camps under Stalin.
Ways to Disappear – Idra Novey
As happens from time to time with critically successful artists, it is almost a fait accompli that the world discovers disparities between the quality of the art and the quality of the creator.
This novel reads like a master-class in workshopped excess, rattling off, with cloying exhaustiveness, every trick in the experimental fiction handbook: abruptly shifting voices, the omission of pronouns, the stylized eschewing of punctuation, relentlessly conspicuous obliquity, semi-ironic deployment of recherché archaisms, etc., etc.
This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back.