The Inland Sea – Madeleine Watts
The Inland Sea demonstrates both what realist fiction can offer, as we try harder to grapple with climate crisis, and what it can’t.
for nigh-on end of season came the apex of her woe
¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence – Diana Taylor
Arguably, much of what is beguiling in Diana Taylor’s approach lies in her refusal to be defeated by the negative dimension of critique; rather, she embraces a relationship with political failure, by focusing precisely on what such failure might produce.
F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry – ed. Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse
Collectively, the poets in F LETTER would doubtlessly endorse Rymbu’s all too familiar battle cry: “To make revolution with the vagina. / To make freedom with oneself.”
Kerninon’s novel speaks to the anxiety of what it would mean to be disappointed — a notably millennial anxiety — and it is here that she realizes a vision for the novel.
Language in Affiliate Modes: Twenty Capsule Reviews
Much of art consists in encouraging ourselves and others to not die, despite the world’s weight.
Slash and Burn – Claudia Hernández
Slash and Burn blurs the defined parameters of literary narratives of war, and the idea that violence has a clear beginning and endpoint, to create a searing vision of a “post-conflict” society and the quiet struggles of its ordinary members.
More Miracle Than Bird – Alice Miller
Alice Miller brazes together speculative and historical fiction into a remarkably sturdy bijou, using the conceits and feints of counterfactual to lend a certain permanence to the real woman time might otherwise be tempted to forget.
Valentino and Sagittarius – Natalia Ginzburg
Her novellas are containers for the cruelest of ironies, and the results are two morality tales, pushed nearly to the limits of realism.
To rely on memory is thus its own kind of slow violence, a delicate crumbling we cannot fully comprehend.