As I read Shut Up/Look Pretty, the thought that kept popping up in my mind was that if Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Bret Easton Ellis made a bunch of literary babies, this would be the result. Equal parts feminine, poetic, visual, rich, frustrating, and haunting, this collection of stories from Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty…

There is nothing at all inherently unsatisfying about a story collection in which there is no overarching theme; I say this because I’m not trying to set up a comparison—it can be great fun, as a reader, to browse through a writer’s workbasket of assorted tricks and styles. To experience a sampling of their skill…

There’s no revelation in Colin Winnette’s Revelation. That itself could be something revelatory. Or that’s a disingenuously reductive way to begin a review. The blurb to end all blurbs. The sentiment that says nothing, reveals nothing. Or maybe that’s the perfect way to begin the review of this book? Or that’s not at all the…

Avery Arlington, the heroine of Dana Johnson’s novel, Elsewhere, California is an African American woman whose parents moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles just before she was born. She is the first and only member of her family to attend university. She is an artist and she is married to a successful and wealthy lawyer…

My knowledge of the Falklands War is limited to whatever bits I’ve picked up over the years from mentions in popular culture, newspapers, and international relations courses in college. Considering I’m neither British nor Argentinian, it’s unsurprising I’ve never been required to study the conflict, though the fact I instinctually refer to “the Falklands” rather…

“There’s a sense now that to be an American fiction writer is to deal with America in the world — and the world in America. If in the past American fiction dealt with the rest of the globe by trying hard to assimilate it, today it deals with it by going outward towards it.” —…

Told in sequential first-person interview-style narrative, a colourful cast of characters reveals the tale of New Yorker Shawn Regal’s murder by horse tranquilizer four days after his marriage to the murderess, Brenda Bernstein. Brenda admits on page one—in fact, sentence one—that she killed him. The whole truth of the matter won’t reveal itself until much…

In a small scene in the very last story of Mary Costello’s most elegant collection, The China Factory, a retiring schoolteacher is being driven to the very party meant to celebrate her long career. She is a curious and wonderful fictional character in that her past includes a painful, transformative event that has shaped every…

Notes from the Committee, Catherine Kasper’s slim volume from Noemi Press, begins with a manual-like, elaborate table of contents. The contents might well stand alone as a piece and should be read through. Because if you don’t, you’ll miss part of what Kasper has done—remember it is a slim volume—and you don’t want to be…

Not all of the narrators of the stories in Jailed have been to jail. But they’ve all been in jails. The distinction seems like it should be less complicated than it is. If you go to the Wikipedia page for American Prison Literature, you’ll see a quote that begins, “Prison has been a fertile setting…

“Art is free. However, it must conform to certain norms.” – Joseph Goebbels, Hotel Kaiserhof Berlin, 1927 Rather an ominous quotation with which to begin a novel, yet invoking Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda and his horrifying vision of artistic freedom sets up a perfect frame for Jürgen Fauth’s début novel, Kino. Kino is a…

In simplest terms, the question with any book review is “should I read this book? Is it worth my time?” The answer: yes! The question might go a little deeper. Does this book do something for me? Again, yes! April Bernard’s Miss Fuller is a must-read if you’re a fan of historical fiction, a lover…