Farris successfully grabs onto the reader and throwing them into the center of the action, along the meta, fourth-wall breaking asides that forces the readers to interact and not just observe. These unnamed characters who are often referred to their functions have broken through those constraining words. These forms created new life, new beings, and new meanings to what literal hybrid forms as Farris proves new literature should be just as bold as she demonstrated.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of What Could be Saved by Gregory Spatz
Spatz does an incredible job overlapping themes through the four short stories. Each entry feels like it’s picking up a thread from the previous story and then using that same thread as a baseline or expanding further on it. It also adds to the re-readability of this collection as in “What Could Be Saved”, “We Unlovely, Unloved”, “The Five”, and “Time and Legends” there are whiffs of reoccurring characters or motifs.
Murder, Mountain Magic, and Embracing the Weird, A Review of Alisa Alering’s Smothermoss
Alisa Alering’s debut novel Smothermoss absorbed me like a fog. Alering grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania where this book is set. From the opening pages, I felt completely immersed in the world of the mountain—its rhythms, sounds, and inexplicable mysteries.
Double Vision: A review of Sun Eye Moon Eye by Vincent Czyz
While there is wonderful word work throughout, Czyz’s prose really sparkles here. Like the “returnal” James Joyce, Czyz leads his readers on a merry chase through myth, literature, and art history.
A review of Beam of Light by John Kinsella
In many ways the characters of Beam of Light are cut off from themselves, but looking up at the stars (multiple light beams) or walking in the woods, they have moments, often fleeting, of self-awareness, where the individual becomes part of a collective and the pain resolves.
A review of Maze by Jennifer Juneau
Jennifer Juneau deftly plays the reader with astounding grief one minute and manic hilarity the next, sometimes both at once. It’s a cinematic maze of emotions, as in a film noir where you wonder if that lady at the playground is the kindly caregiver she appears to be or a monstrous child molester.
New giveaway!
We have a copy of Will End in Fire by Nicole Bokat give away!
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A review of Take Me With You Next Time by Janis Hubchman
Hubschman has a close style with a mixture of tenses, one that always stays close to the mind of the woman whose story this is. She tends to chew to the pith with brief character descriptions: “…Nina was at least a half-foot taller than Joy with dark cropped hair and fashionable chunky-framed glasses”.
A review of Fog & Car by Eugene Lim
Eugene Lim has buried a layer of magic deep below the surface of the early chapters and it rises slowly as the narrative progresses. When it finally surfaces on the page, it shimmers along the edges of Sarah and Jim’s lives, turning the banal into the weird and supernatural.
Giveaway!
We have a copy of A Golden Life by Ginny Kubitz Moyerto give away!
To win, sign up for our Free Newsletter on the right-hand side of the site and enter via the newsletter. Winner will be chosen by the end of August from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!