Book Reviews Archive
Bunny by Mona Awad
Awad’s leap into the unreal summons new life to the familiar woes of academia and art making.
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
In Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, the dead resemble the living, and the living seem to be on the brink of death.
Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores
An ill-fated expedition entangles the protagonist of Fernando A. Flores’ new novel in a powerful syndicate whose tentacles of influence sprawl in all directions, and whose sinister and audacious ambitions materialize a trufflepig with the body of a pig, the hide of a crocodile, and the beak of an
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
There is pleasure to be had in reading Julia Phillips’ debut novel, even in the midst of such grief and despair. Phillips is a beautiful, assured writer, one who knows how to create fully-developed characters, a marvelous sense of place, and a constant forward momentum.
China Dream by Ma Jian
In Ma Jian’s new novel, the traumatic dream is one where “the past and the present form a tangled web from which it becomes impossible to break free.”
Spring by Ali Smith
To read a book by Ali Smith is to know that she will ask you to do some work, though that work will always be a pleasure and a bit of a game.
Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal
Paisley Rekdal’s sixth poetry collection explores the ways desire, pain, fear, and trauma transform us, often without our permission, and often into something unexpected.
The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye
Nye’s melding of voices in her new poetry collection is an activism of its own. Not only does this decision create a space for Palestinian mourning, it also actively works to shatter an us versus them mentality with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Mother Is a Verb by Sarah Knott
Sarah Knott, an historian and faculty member at Indiana University Bloomington, has reached deep into archival material for stories of how mothers of the past spent their days.
Let Me Out Here by Emily W. Pease
The South, to Emily Pease, is “beautiful and memory-rich, with a layer of dark.” The same could be said about her stories, though the layer of dark within is thick and permeates the whole—like the heat on an August day in the South, nothing is left untouched by it.