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.
Author:
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.
New giveaway!
We have 2 copies of The Millionaire Mop: Your Path to Cleaning Business Wealth by Nats Cleaning to 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 June from subscribers who enter via the newsletter. Good luck!
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 Tough Poets Review 02 edited by Kathleen Cullen & Rick Schober
This spirited new journal lives up to its name: solid, uncompromising and shot through with a vigorous lyricism. Tough Poets Review is an adventurous blend of diverse voices and artistic styles, a rich feast for the eye and mind. Literary journals as lively and interesting as this are rarely come by.
A review of Farhang Book Two by Patrick Woodcock
What makes Farhang Book Two such a powerful achievement is the way it unites global experience with the emotional terrain of Nunavut and the Arctic. Every remembered country and conflict passes through the stillness and isolation of the North before reaching the page. The result is a collection where geography becomes inseparable from psychology, and where memory itself behaves like tidewater beneath ice: shifting, returning, impossible to contain.
A review of Misery and Other Choices directed by Samuel Lucas Allen
Samuel Lucas Allen has just released another short film and as with his previous film, Cut, Misery and Other Choices, is a powerful and slightly disturbing reflection on eco-anxiety, grief and the difficult trade-off between hate and hope. Though the film is only ten minutes long the questions it raises about culpability, ethics and sustainability leave a lasting impression.
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.
Thin Reed Throat by Damien Becker
Suffice to say, Damien does not shy away from difficult topics. But what I appreciated was that he doesn’t get cloying or guilt-trippy about the relentlessness of living with a chronic condition, the suffering, the endurance, or the witnessing of his friends suffering too. He lets the imagery do the heavy lifting. And it’s the very simplicity of statement, the lack of adornment in the stark truth, that hits even harder.
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.