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.”
A sharp, tunnel visioned interrogation of what happened and happens to Harchi, her family, her neighbors. The “we” she uses in the title and in the text could be a “we” of her family unit, but also of second-generation North African immigrants, all suffering racism in France.
The Night Flowers – Sara Herchenroether
Cancer is not just a disease within the body . . . it affects perceived notions of what it means to live and die, and how one chooses to do so.
Daybreak at Chavez Ravine – Erik Sherman
If you go searching for a story and come up empty, do you still write the book?
The Telaraña Circuit – Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola
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.
Love is deep underground with her speaker’s heart, begging the question: If the soul is hiding, how can there ever be enough love?