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Category: Book Reviews

  • The Words That Remain

    Turmoil burrowing deep in the body can produce an outward calm: measured speech, deliberate action, quashed lust. Literature has often matched repression’s timbre, especially when it involves queerness. The serene mountain landscapes of Brokeback Mountain as backdrop to Jack and Ennis’s forbidden and doomed love come to mind.  The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel,…

  • The Last Pomegranate Tree

    Living through war is an experience of surreal dissonance. War ruptures reality and destroys its continuity, so there’s no bridge between life before and after. This is more than just the normal passage of time. War breaks reality, exchanging your normal life for one battered and bloodied by trauma. Bachtyar Ali, a Kurdish novelist, poet,…

  • The Consequences

    The Consequences, a new collection of short stories by Manuel Muñoz set mostly around Fresno in the 1980s, features characters whose lives are precarious in different ways. They’re often queer and sometimes unsure of their identities. Many are Mexican migrants looking for work. But in one way or another, all are living on society’s tattered…

  • The Confessions of Matthew Strong

    Allegra Douglass, a professor of philosophy in New York City, is living the dream. Recently been promoted to tenure with a named chair, she has a loving partner, the respect of (most of) her colleagues, talented students, and work she enjoys. She’s also Black, and she’s traveled a long and hard road from her difficult…

  • The Golden Land

    Elizabeth Shick’s debut novel The Golden Land is a significant achievement. In it, the microcosm of one family’s experiences gestures toward the macrocosm of Myanmar’s complex history. Long called “the golden land” for the golden pagodas and stupas dotting the landscape, Myanmar has endured beyond name changes and shifting political tides. In The Golden Land,…

  • Boundless as the Sky

    When I was nine or ten, my family vacationed at Disney World. The Magic Kingdom was indeed magical, though the aspect that remains hooked in my memory thirty years later isn’t the Florida sunshine, or my autographs from Mickey and Minnie, but the Carousel of Progress.  Situated inside a futuristic-themed Tomorrowland, the Carousel of Progress…

  • The Company of Strangers

    Few of the characters in The Company of Strangers, Jen Michalski’s third collection of short stories, meet as literal strangers. Rather, Michalski relays states of strangeness forged in breakups, homecomings, familial estrangement, and immature love. Whether the relationships are new or long-term, Michalski’s characters form intimacies by pushing and pulling each other into altered states.…

  • Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret

    This collection of dizzying and dazzling dystopian fairytales propels the reader through a sexually intriguing, violent, shy, erudite, and disingenuous mind—think Glee Club and High School Musical meet American Psycho. In these stories, image and surface are exploited and controlled by a series of sexually obsessed narrators. “You are only whatever text I write across…

  • Dreams Under Glass

    Anca L. Szilágyi’s latest novel, Dreams Under Glass, follows Binnie, an aspiring diorama artist and struggling millennial dealing with her quarter-life crisis while trying to survive in New York City. She has a decent job as a paralegal, a job she must keep while finding time to fulfill her creative ambitions and social obligations. When…

  • No Windmills In Basra

    In describing No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from Arabic by Chip Rossetti, it’s tempting simply to list the fantastic: stars cascade out of a woman’s hair; a lark searches for disappearing dimples; a boy oozes salt from his pores, an excrescence “his aunts on his mother’s side would have preferred it were…

  • Tell Us When To Go

    Bay Area-writer Emil DeAndreis’s compulsively readable novel, Tell Us When To Go, begins with an ending: the denouement of Cole Gallegos’s baseball career. A once-promising prospect destined to make millions, Cole develops a case of the “yips,” and his skills suddenly vanish. After a few months of struggle, and an impulsive early retirement, Cole escapes…

  • The Memory of the Air

    The Memory of the Air by Belgian writer Caroline Lamarche, translated from the French by Katherine Gregor, is a novella about relationships, trauma, and the abuse of power. In this novella, presented as a monologue, an anonymous female narrator comes to terms with sexual trauma and an abusive relationship, the details of which slowly unfold…