While most of the stories are told in the third person, “Rubia,” “Small Country” and “The Death of Carrie Bradshaw” are first-person narratives. These stories especially go to the heart of the misunderstandings that prevail throughout this collection. “Rubia” is related by Josie, a girl who tells us she grew up “at the bottom-ass edge of Delmarva, a landscape of crab shacks and chicken farms where the only thing flat as the Chesapeake Bay in your face were the swamps at your back.”
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of Rite of Spring by Kris Kneen
Kris Kneen new book, Rite of Spring, is delightful, strange and bizarrely sexy. The title hints at awakening and that is one of the key themes in this book, which teases and tricks the reader with its silky narration, fast plot, and the beautiful conjunction of suspense and rich inner dialogue.
A review of What Mennonite Girls Are Good For by Jennifer Sears
It’s a high-stakes adventure, with planes, guns, pervs, and the gyrations of a goddess in disguise. At the end of the day, it’s a short story collection about religious syncretization, told with a voice of winsome aloofness that makes funnier-than-hell into its own corner plot in heaven.
A review of Skylighting by Charles Hansmann
Skylighting is written in close first person with a deeply speculative, experiential tone. Impulsively I ask, why do we write, and read, novels like this? Maybe we are trying to get at something fundamental, visceral. Something communal yet impossible to share. The universal experience of loss accompanied by a grasping, an inability to psychologically adjust to an overwhelming absence
A review of The Shipikisha Club by Mubanga Kalimamukwento
The alternating chapters of the first part that focus on Ntashé as she attends her mother’s trial highlight the tensions between mother and daughter, as she witnesses the way her mother is changed “from the person she knew to the monster gaining color as the trial proceeds.” Though well aware of her father’s violence and drunkenness, Ntashé seems more inclined to sympathize with him than with her mother, whom she sees as a sort of bully.
A review of Man Ray: When Objects Dream by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson
When Objects Dream, the catalog raisonée, the book, is a work of art in itself. It will turn your coffee table into a living museum. The reproductions are stark, practically bleeding; the organization of the book, skirting Ray’s ever-wavering lines between genre and chronology, is every bit as delicious and sumptuous — practically on a par with — a visit to the exhibit itself.
A review of Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Tender is the Flesh shows the horrific effects of apathy. Bazterrica spares no detail. There is no breathing room, no one to hold your hand as you read the atrocities depicted in this novel. Though incredibly graphic and disturbing, Tender is the Flesh is one of the best novels I’ve read and has left a permanent impression in my mind.
A review of The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch
From the get-go, Guillermo Stitch’s new novel The Coast of Everything hurls salvos of delicious sentences, voice, and prescient irony that hit the reader broadsides and leave them gasping for crawl space but wanting more. These days, reading – let alone writing – a 747-page novel is a highly transgressive, seditious, treasonous act.
A review of Once We Were Wildlife by Inga Simpson
Once We Were Wildlife is a collection that explores the human/natural world connection, moving beyond the standard character arc into metamorphosis. The characters are not so much in nature as they are discovering their essential selves as nature. Simpson handles the transformation subtly but the writing is so resonant that the reader cannot help but rethink their own sense of self.
A review of The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir
Elkin’s translation reads exceptionally well as English prose. It conveys the frazzled state of Beauvoir’s hero, a young wife and mother, barely in her thirties, as well as Beauvoir’s attitude toward narrative literature, opposed to the experimental forms of the 50s and 60s, and in favor of fiction that was socially motivated, shamelessly didactic, and set clarity of social vision as its practical task. But that does not entail a retread of mimetic naturalism.