Reviews

God Went Like That – Yxta Maya Murray

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In this polyvocal portrait of how race, ethnicity, class, and gender stratify environmental threat, Murray, a Latina novelist and professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, peers into the wide gap between US legal protections and environmental justice. 

You, Bleeding Childhood – Michele Mari

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Celebrating the enchantment of those first toys and books, the collection is imbued with a sense of wonder and adventure, threatened at every corner by the harshness of adulthood and the looming fear that soon it will all be lost.

The Stronghold – Dino Buzzati

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The possibility of Tatars, or in fact anyone, attacking the Fortezza, are not the real danger. Instead, time, rumor, and misplaced trust are the ultimate foe.

The Beast You Are – Paul Tremblay

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Short fiction is its own country in the horror world. . . . You have less time to pull off a grand narrative feat, so you have to keep it simple. This is a tall order for Tremblay, who must try to stamp his brand of ambiguity onto a format that demands precision.

Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex – Juana María Rodríguez

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How does our obsession with narratives of despair obscure moments of pleasure that also shape sex workers’ lives?

The Delivery – Margarita García Robayo

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Languages are not internally coherent, fixed entities. Instead of assuming that all speakers of a language can understand each other with perfect ease, The Delivery reveals the fissures, gaps, and spaces of incomprehension that can exist between speakers of the same language.

Other Minds and Other Stories­­ – Bennett Sims

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Other minds are all around us, infecting us with their desires, affects, and ideas, and yet they remain fundamentally unknowable to us.

Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo

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Juan Rulfo’s only novel defies logic. It is out to evade readers, to tease them for their attempts at understanding. Uncertainties, red herrings, and anxieties abound, all of which give Pedro Páramo its particular flavor.

Human Sacrifices – María Fernanda Ampuero

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The characters of these stories live in fear of the moment that a villain will grab hold of them. But there is another side to this fear: desire. The terrible thing, in Ampuero’s stories, also holds a certain allure.

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle – Roque Dalton

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[Roque Dalton] knew it would not be simple, winning a revolution in El Salvador. Still he went.