Book Reviews Archive
Three Philadelphia Women and Their Poetry Chapbooks
Three of Philly’s poets, Pattie McCarthy, Alina Pleskova, and Rachel Milligan, have published chapbooks on a medieval visionary, conceptions of desire and identity, and the sometimes-creepy underbelly of reality.
Review: SMOOTHIE by Claudine Toutoungi
Smoothie Claudine Toutoungi Carcanet Press Ltd, Dec. 1 2017 80 pp; $12.99 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Peter Pegnall It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens,
The Best Short Story I Read This Month: “The Cock in Cadwalader Heights” by Ariel Delgado Dixon
In the short story “The Cock in the Cadwalader Heights” from the Masters Review, Ariel Delgado Dixon uses subtle details throughout the narrative to show how eleven-year-old Madín is starting to view the world differently.
Review: HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER by Nick White
White’s book explores the intersection of southern culture where sexuality identity clashes with religious ideals. The novel takes on our desire to fit in and the dangerous complicity that can result.
Review: OUT OF CONTEXT by John Gosslee
Presented in a series of “blackouts,” which redact the work of numerous contemporary poets, Out of Context reads as an innovative and highly visual ars poetica.
Review: THE DEATHS OF HENRY KING by Jesse Ball, Brian Evenson, and Lili Carré
In The Deaths of Henry King, the titular Henry King dies no less than eighty-nine times.
Review: FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss
Forest Dark Nicole Krauss Harper Collins; September 2017 304 pp; $27.99 Buy: hardcover | eBook In February 2015, a small, easy-to-miss column appeared at the beginning of Elle magazine. Squeezed between advertisements, novelist Nicole Krauss wrote of her grandmother’s career as a door-to-door bra saleswoman in London from 1949
The Best Short Story I Read This Month: “The Kindest” by Sonya Larson
Returning from the brink of death with a new lease on life: it’s a common trope in fiction and nonfiction alike. These stories are easy for the reader to believe, as one hopes that coming so close to the dark unknown would carry with it some sort of positive
Review: HUNGER, A MEMOIR OF (MY) BODY by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is America’s favorite "bad feminist." She is often read as a black feminist, but her Haitian roots rarely get more than a passing mention. And yet, Haiti is the unseen backdrop to Gay’s memoir Hunger: a fierce, black, female, fat narrative.
Debut Chapbooks from Barrelhouse, Third Man Books, and Sutra Press
These three presses dropped their very first chapbook this calendar year: Barrelhouse, known for its literary journal; Third Man Books, Jack White’s Third Man Records’ publishing outlet; and Sutra Press, a brand new micro-press out of Clarksville, Arkansas.