People Love Dead Jews – Dara Horn
The deep obsession with her book by Jewish audiences has made some cry foul: instead of great books on Judaism and Jewish history we just end up with more and more bestsellers about antisemitism.
Permanent Volta – Rosie Stockton
Rosie’s poems persist as little gifts of friendship and care in the present.
In keeping with real pre-Zuck San Francisco spirit, from the Beats to Brautigan to the language poets, give everything you can; withhold anything you want; such is the imperative and prerogative of the artist, whatever the risks, audience and establishment be damned.
The Mill – Bess Brenck Kalischer
The Mill is a smirking sphinx, packed with wisdom that remains partly obscured by a Magic Eye puzzle of symbolism, fairy tale references, and outer space.
Cortez seems far less interested in exploring trauma than people’s resilience.
Where the Sky Meets the Ocean – Mike Kleine & Dan Hoy
Soft sci-fi, low-fi everything, a prose poetry novel investigating the now, the new and novel, and the end
Seçkin adds an interesting nuance by depicting how feelings of appropriation can play out at a more intimate, family level.
Dinner Party: A Tragedy – Sarah Gilmartin
Even if Sarah Gilmartin’s debut novel elicits inevitable associations with Irish intellectual and artistic heavyweights, this portrait of mourning and redemption stands on its own.
DEATH FUGUE is an allegorical tale as chilling in parts as anything by Atwood or Zamyatin, yet told with airy, fitful surrealism. It is both reposeful and purposeful, an unerringly calm vision of beauty and terror.
Seasons of Purgatory – Shahriar Mandanipour
Mandanipour, in Khalili’s translation, cultivates an unsettling sort of ambiguity, an open-endedness that makes these stories rich with enigma, asking to be read, then read again.