Reviews

The Telaraña Circuit – Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

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When one tunes into the frequencies of this “telaraña circuit,” one polishes one’s antennae, seeking to distill symbols from the living text of the world.

New Life – Ana Božičević

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Love is deep underground with her speaker’s heart, begging the question: If the soul is hiding, how can there ever be enough love?

House Work – Cindy Juyoung Ok

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Form doesn’t merely shape content, but creates it. This is a scary fact. Language threatens the freedom of things, making complexity seem fixed and turning loved ones into abstractions.

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu – Augusto Higa Oshiro

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With his passivity resulting from the weighty history of deprivation and discrimination, what are the conditions for the possibility of Nakamatsu’s enlightenment?

The Narrow Cage – Vasily Eroshenko

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All of these characters, whether human or otherwise, are connected in their subjection to both nature’s and humanity’s whims.

Dangerous Love – Ben Okri

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Omovo seems in many ways detached from the day to day . . . That might be the best way to handle yourself in a world where baffling violence is as much a part of life as a breeze or birdsong.

Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World – Eliane Brum

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Without its forests intact, the Earth faces collapse, just as the mind, body, and heart will crumble if our lungs rot ahead of schedule.

Everything I Never Wanted to Know – Christine Hume

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The experience of reading Hume’s essays powerfully mimics how it feels to live in a world saturated with sexual violence.

Bruno’s Conversion – Tsipi Keller

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At the heart of Jewish American fiction since 1945 are questions of assimilation, identity, faith, and the Holocaust. A handful of contemporary writers continue to engage these themes with renewed ambivalence, both advancing and complicating inherited literary style.

Black Observatory – Christopher Brean Murray

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A mixture of flash fiction-like prose poems and sensory-laden verse, the collection itself is the black observatory.