Gold Fame Citrus – Claire Vaye Watkins
[Gold Fame Citrus] speaks to the part of me that sees a drained lake as more than a localized crisis affecting only a handful of fish, and wonders about the texture and shape of the greater crisis that an event like this portends.
In this short but expansive book which reads sometimes like poetry, sometimes like philosophy, and always like resistance, Berkowitz encourages us to become authoritative about our own experiences.
Martin John – Anakana Schofield
Martin John is not so much a character as a caricature of masculinity, a figure that, though, granted a privileged position in meaning’s labyrinth, is, nevertheless, caught in his own circuit, fumbling with his zipper.
The Roar of Morning – Tip Marugg
The Roar of Morning is quite anti-climactic — in a digressive and descriptive mode it falls well short of self-knowledge or it fails to intimate truths, those buried umbilical cords, that an apocalyptic event is waiting to disinter.
A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin
Berlin’s stories examine the consequences of living as if one were free when one is, because female, necessarily not.
Somewhere in the fibers of the book’s skeleton, there is a legitimate philosophical argument about free will or a lack thereof, and in many circumstances, it might be an interesting one.
Sometimes I Lie and Sometimes I Don’t – Nadja Spiegel
There is always the sense that Spiegel’s narrators are learning and relearning the rules of propriety; that they are struggling to negotiate public expectations.
The Things We Don’t Do – Andrés Neuman
The best stories in the collection are similarly masterful examples of the short form, and beautiful expeditions into the nebulous space between self and other.
Vanished [is] a treatise on the responsibilities we have to confront the legacies of occupation, of lies, and to insist on the disclosure of history’s truths.
Silence and Song – Melanie Rae Thon
Silence and Song is Thon’s most radical experiment in form and lyrical expression.