Reviews

Viper Wine – Hermione Eyre

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Viper Wine whispers beyond its pages, reappearing in glossy advertisements of Elle and in strange-tasting rouged lips.

Octavia’s Brood – Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown

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What if what we’ve been conditioned to see as our weaknesses were in fact our greatest strengths? How do we deal effectively with conflict without contributing to an ongoing cycle of violence?

Disgruntled – Asali Solomon

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Solomon’s protagonist does a good job of insulating herself from the outside world. This ensures that not much happens.

Dear Thief – Samantha Harvey

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Letters offer both an emotional intimacy and an intellectual challenge that can be hard to resist.

Apocalypse Baby – Virginie Despentes

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Solving a missing person case is more a matter of waiting for that person to connect back to the grid, even for just a moment.

Fifteen Dogs – André Alexis

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Alexis takes up notions of language and consciousness on a fundamental level, and what it means to have both or one without the other.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary – Sarah Manguso

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Reading this essay gives me hope that I will outgrow my fear of death.

Midnight in the Century – Victor Serge

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Whether or not the arc of the universe bends towards justice, it might be better if we could hold onto the idea that it might. If we try to bend it that way, maybe it could.

The First Bad Man – Miranda July

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Combat is intimate. Living is intimate. The space between my socks and the front of my boots is intimate.

Texas: The Great Theft – Carmen Boullosa

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It’s an interesting counterpart to a mainstream Anglo-Texan version of this history that erases the violence.