Somewhere between mathematics as melodramatic caricature and migraine-inducing combinatorial, what about a third way?
The Secret Adventures of Order – Vincent Czyz
Czyz remains on guard against prose writers whose search for the poetic slides into squashy self-indulgence, like someone picking up a karaoke microphone with a mistaken confidence that they really can sing.
A Dream of a Woman – Casey Plett
The stories in A Dream of a Woman, much like the characters, hold each other up.
Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning – Liz Prato
Truth and reconciliation: it’s not something we do well here in the United States.
For many, regimes of misremembrance can feel like opening a closet full of skeletons, only to find beautiful shoes.
All of the lives described in Far West are in some way beholden to the mercy of their surroundings, its influence inescapable.
These Dark Skies – Arianne Zwartjes
A powerful antidote to loneliness, apathy, and the myth of perfect politics.
The Drowned Forest – Angela Barry
In a book about the struggle for authenticity amidst artifice, for freedom amidst falsification, her unique form is an expansive and exciting way forward.
Little Foxes Took Up Matches – Katya Kazbek
Kazbek weaves the fairy tale’s threads into a larger queer narrative to complicate questions of gender and sexuality.
Pictures of the Shark – Thomas H. McNeely
He knows his characters so well that he can tend more closely to the surface, allowing the dark underbelly to show only when absolutely demanded by the story.