My Cousin Maria Schneider – Vanessa Schneider
Perhaps a story told through the prism of deep love will always be molded to the contours of its creator; a twinning of subject and author.
The Italy Letters – Vi Khi Nao
Where do you put your emotional energy when you love someone who doesn’t love you back?
Mystery Lights – Lena Valencia
Through the process of stripping away parts of the self . . . the women come face-to-face with their own uncanny reality, however ugly. Ghosts do not give up easily.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility – Isabel Waidner
Waidner dramatizes the knots into which society will twist itself to keep capital out of the hands of the disenfranchised.
Sister Golden Calf – Colleen Burner
One of the greatest joys of Burner’s novella is that classic feature of the road trip: not having any clue who or what you are going to run into next.
SCHOOL eviscerates post-structural conceits, derides the cult-leader-status of celebrity intellectuals, and denounces the academic pyramid scheme.
No paean to Montreal’s transformation into a global capital of commerce and culture . . . [Bock’s novel] imagines one of the countless souls who built contemporary Montreal, giving their bodies for the city . . .
All the Way to Summer – Fiona Kidman
Particularly in those stories set in dismal small towns or isolated rural plots in mid-twentieth century Aotearoa (New Zealand), [Kidman’s] women long for escape: for a bigger, more liberated elsewhere.
Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home – Jessica E. Johnson
So much within these pages concerns the relationship between self and place, and between place and environment, what we do to it and take from it.
Sun’s first novel is very much its own book, but it invites comparison to Fyodor’s 1880 family-drama-cum-spiritual-murder-mystery, The Brothers Karamazov, so boldly that I think I’ll go ahead and compare them.