Incendiary . . . an innovative subversion of the male gaze in a dark comedy packaging.
Weak in Comparison to Dreams – James Elkins
WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS [may] look like a recovery narrative, but it’s actually a re-cover-up story.
[Quintana] strips away the illusions that parents hold that they can just “cloak” their language or argue behind closed doors. Children see through it. They always have.
Mistaken for an Empire – Christine Imperial
“Where do you call home?” the world seems to ask . . . Imperial finds herself unable or unwilling to decide.
Tales of Tangier: The Complete Short Stories of Mohamed Choukri
Even in the stories that project a more lighthearted air . . . there is a looming sense that something is horribly wrong, that the party is over.
Always Crashing in the Same Car – Lance Olsen
[Olsen’s novel] doesn’t blur the lines between history and invention, fiction and nonfiction—it doesn’t recognize the existence of these lines in the first place.
A rich meditation on the burden of remembrance, the ruins of the past, and the ruins that climate crisis will soon bring us, Landscapes is a tightly woven debut that travels easily between epistles, point of view shifts, and art criticism.
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time – Sheila Liming
For a world currently crossing the threshold into climate apocalypse, hanging out as anti-despair, as an assertion of human dignity and value, feels revolutionary.
Love Chronicles of the Octopodes – Karen An-Hwei Lee
Emily D. is a biogenetically engineered entity gone wrong, somehow flubbed in the petri dishes and tubes of the “stardust editors of the Genzopolis,” thrown out like yesterday’s trash into a black hole that smells of honey and rhododendrons.
Natsumi knows she’s bored, but she keeps trying to convince herself that boredom is comfort, safety, and happiness. In actuality, boredom is the closest thing to Natsumi’s identity; it’s what she’s “about.”