Reviews

If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display – Nick Thran

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If It Gets Quiet Later On is its own tabletop display, a grouping of poems, short stories, and essays connected (mostly) by Thran’s life as a writer, reader, and bookseller.

The Caretaker – Doon Arbus

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The caretaker tries to keep the objects in his collection from speaking about the lives they have lived . . . reducing them to mere list of objects. The more he fights the resonance of their voices, the more they resist becoming metaphors of the past.

Cross-Stitch – Jazmina Barrera

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Fragments scattered throughout the novel tell of women who used embroidery to share messages, whether to reassure loved ones of their well-being, call for help after being silenced, or protest political injustice.

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.