“Poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really, literature is pathetic,” declares Eileen Myles in the introduction to their 2022 anthology Pathetic Literature. To anyone who’s ever tried to hand a feeling over to language, this provocation is, in fact, a form of praise. For Myles, the pathetic is neither shameful nor unspeakable. Rather, it […]
Although I may not reach my annual reading goal for the first time since 2016, there was one book I read twice this year. That’s All I Know, the novel by Elisa Levi and translated by Christina MacSweeney, accompanied me like a companion at the end of the world. After all, for Little Lea, the […]
Vanessa Saunders’ The Flat Woman, an experimental novel and winner of the 2025 FC2 Ronald F. Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, can be loosely summed up as a novel documenting the fragmentation and dysmorphia of postmodern life. However, this novel warrants a far closer look as an innovative example of overturning the commonplace of form defining […]
There are only three characters in The Last Way, Cameron L. Mitchell’s debut novella: the father, the mother, and our protagonist of undetermined age, the son. Largely set outside of time and place, the trio lack neighbors, extended family, coworkers, or school ties. They exist together (the word “live” would be generous) in a small […]
In the riveting opening story of Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection, a young couple attending a family wedding in Texas Hill Country wonders if their love might be doomed by a family curse, originating with an ancestor who abandoned his partner to escape enslavement. At the story’s close, his descendant, Ever, considers the possible versions […]
“Landing on the Moon,” the third story of Pablo Morábito’s newly translated collection The Shadow of the Mammoth, begins with eight of its nine characters falling asleep. The one remaining, young Fabricio, is instructed to wake everyone up when it’s time for Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon. The story happens in the leadup […]
In The Odyssey, Odysseus tricks the cyclops, Polyphemus, by lying when asked his name— Odysseus says, “My name is nobody . . . .” So after being wounded, when his fellow cyclops come to his aid and ask who hurt him, Polyphemus responds, “Nobody hurt me.” This anonymity and renouncing of a name gives Odysseus […]
In “The Mothers,” a story in Julia Elliott’s excellent new collection, Kate is a screenwriter at an art colony dedicated to the creative work of mothers and their children. Kate spends her days getting high and working on a screenplay about a woman whose demonic Boston terrier opens a portal to hell, while Kate’s daughter, […]
There’s no easy or obvious way to portray the trauma of loss and the spiraling events of a life that has lost its footing, but a narrative bursting with jokes and told in reverse chronological order might not be the first thing that comes to mind. Fortunately, David Galef is no ordinary writer, and his […]
Two Lines Press, the award-winning San Francisco-based publisher renowned for its focus on original literature in translation, offers readers an intriguing new release: a horror novel by Spanish author Layla Martínez. Woodworm (Carcoma, in Spanish) tells the story of a grandmother and her granddaughter, confined within the claustrophobic walls of a haunted house nestled in […]