So many of Gaudry’s sentences, from the very first – “Because most nights during the final semester of my MFA at George Mason University, while recovering from a mild traumatic brain injury, I fell asleep watching Prison Break on my laptop in bed.” – to the penultimate sentence – “Because words, imagined in the greatest yearning, as a means of finding love, defining it; as a means of shaping it (This is how it feels, this is where it hurts) and sharing with others its permutations, astonishments, exaltations, and erosions.” – seem to offer an explanation for some unstated condition.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of The Victoria Principle by Michael Farrell
By keeping close to home, the pieces in this collection challenge notions of what is and isn’t real, undermining notions of memoir, which is a construct no matter how it’s labelled. It makes for consistently entertaining, and often challenging reading that encourages uncertainty. This shift between memoir, fiction and poetry feels seamless, challenging the reader to re-examine notions of identity, history art.
A review of Final Curtain edited by Steve Berman
Final Curtain is a well curated collection featuring a pleasant variety of stories and interesting perspectives and interpretations of the characters and themes of The Phantom of the Opera. The period pieces are heavy and languid, broken up effectively by modern retellings, more experimental works, and the doings of cats. Choosing classical in style pieces at the fore and aft of the anthology was a masterful choice; one prepares you for what follows, the latter closes the loop; the audience at the theater retreat satisfied.
A review of Where do you live? by Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and Jennifer Jean
The job of creative individuals, then, is to bear witness to the horrors inflicted by those who would destroy “our distant spark of light.” We must resist and carry our light into the future. Our task, says Where do you live?, is to be constantly raw , constantly attuned to these insults. We must feel them, record them, and keep going.
A review of The Dingo’s Noctuary by Judith Nangala Crispin
The idea that we are all en route to returning to outer space is a healing and consoling thought, bringing together the many themes in the book in a way that is both beautiful and heartbreaking. At $130,The Dingo’s Noctuary is not a cheap book, but it is a work of art, and one that continues to call the reader back to find new threads, new stories, and new transformations.
It Can Happen Here. And Here. And Here: a review of Helen Button by Carol Roh Spaulding
Helen Button is a minor character in Stein’s 1940 novel Paris, France. But in Carol Roh Spaulding’s ambitious, painstakingly researched, dual-narrative novel, Hélène—whose American mother is fragile, whose French father has left the family, and whose stuffy stepfather, while by no means a horror, works for the Vichy government—arrives on the page as an eighty-three year-old woman in 2005, haunted by the memory of Isaiah Langwill, a three-year-old Jewish orphan who may or may not have been sent to a concentration camp from a hiding place near Stein and Toklas’s country home.
A review of Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin
Both despite and because of the sweeping, sincere critiques of medical and capitalist corruption, Beilin buoys her sea with tongue-in-cheek wit as well as humor, a hallmark of Oulipian writing. Every joke and turn of phrase maintains the novel’s brisk pace, an asset most well-executed when Cumin’s post-surgery mind sputters out choppy fragments.
A review of Anna by Angus Gaunt
The whole book has a feel of allegory, with the forest taking on an almost animistic feel – you get the sense of this non-human life crackling around Anna – but we also are invested in Anna’s survival. This is partly because Anna’s trajectory is driven forward by her growing survival instinct as she navigates night-time cold, constant hunger, environmental dangers, and the ever-present threat of the people she encounters – some helpful and some less so.
A review of Our Precious Wars by Perrine Tripier
Tripier’s exacting prose captures the story of a woman locked in and looking back on life, but it also holds moments of sheer joy recognizable by any reader who’s creating or reliving memory. May those moments extend beyond the walls of a house into a fully-lived life. Level the rubble, indeed.
A review of The Last Furies by John Biscello
John Biscello’s astonishing work, The Last Furies, is a vaudeville routine wrapped around a radio drama, tucked into a theater piece, bound by a screenplay, drawn into a rich and sprawling novel. Imagine a character in a play. What if they had an inner life outside of the script and the production itself?