Aurora Mattia’s first novel, The Fifth Wound, is many books in one. Sarah Gerard calls it “a densely embroidered autofictional mythography,” and Mattia herself has described it as “a scrapbook in the form of a hymn.” The text is filled with literary echoes, pop culture references, and forays into criticism and history that make clear […]
“Ostensibly I write novels and stories,” Danielle Dutton writes at the start of “A Picture Held Us Captive,” the long essay on ekphrastic writing that makes up the third section, “Art,” of her book Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, “yet I often find myself more interested in spaces and things than in plots. The world is […]
When I first read Bojan Louis’s short story collection Sinking Bell, I was an MFA student halfway into a semester-long translation and adaptation course that for me, a short story writer, served as a primer to poetry. It was there that I learned about the opposing but complementary elements of the poetics—sound and form, narrative […]
Photo by Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash 1. Judenfrage We visited my grandmother Roberta once per season while growing up, always in her crowded Brooklyn apartment. It was almost a three-hour drive from our house outside Philly, but my grandmother never smiled when we arrived. Even when her husband was still alive, she sat away from […]
For the people who do not inhabit them, islands have always only represented either a fantasy or a nightmare. Islands are unmoored from the laws and mundane moralities of the continent. That is, to the landlocked imagination, the point of them. This has been true in literature, in works from The Tempest to Joan Didion’s […]
In Absolute Away, Lance Olsen develops three distinct “movements” to structure a novel that takes the reader from Nazi Germany, to Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956, and eventually into a multiverse where the protagonist dissolves into something fluid and intangible. This structural complexity creates a kaleidoscopic view of narrative and language. Discerning up from down […]
Trial and Error Who are we allowed to love? Who should we worship? How do we know who to trust? For the female protagonists in Pak Kyongni’s stories, trying to survive in a patriarchal society ruined by war, the answers can only be found through trial and error while losing much of themselves along the […]
“Words rained all around me,” states our narrator in a moment of loss, clarity, and reverie. “At first a soft drizzle—conjunctions, words that seemed to connect but not describe.” The moment, placed at the start of the novel as the consequence of a dead end, carefully cradles a waning sense of identity and purpose: “Flowing […]
The late Naira Kuzmich’s In Everything I See Your Hand is a startling and provocative debut story collection chronicling the lives of Armenian-Americans in Los Angeles, whose stories defy categorization as they subvert our commonly held notions of what it means to seek a “better life” in America. Kuzmich’s characters navigate loss, generational differences, family […]
Shy is Max Porter’s fourth novel, after Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lonny, both literature with a magical realist spin. Shy, on the other hand, is contemporary literary fiction which focuses inside the mind of the sixteen-year-old protagonist, Shy. His mind is a sort of (dis)organized chaos as he processes through a mountain […]