In the summer of 2020, Clifford Garstang, author of House of the Ancients and Other Stories, and Terese Svoboda, author of Great American Desert, interviewed each other via email about their most recent releases of story collections. This is a transcript … Continued
(Los Angeles, CA: Unnamed Press 2020) Dark. Delicious. Smart and deeply literary. A novel of sublime prose and piquant wit, A Certain Hunger, by Chelsea G. Summers, is part psychological thriller, part unapologetic tale of sexual desire from a woman … Continued
Translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (Sheffield, UK: And Other Stories, 2020) Early in Swedish author Andrzej Tichý’s fifth novel, Wretchedness, this reader had the sinking feeling that the narrative would be a latter-day, sentimental retrospective on drug addiction and … Continued
Translated from French by Adriana Hunter (New York: Other Press, 2020) Written in poetic, gorgeously sparse prose, Pauline Delabroy-Allard’s debut novel, They Say Sarah, captures the intensity of two women’s violent and obsessive love affair. Structured in two parts, … Continued
Translated from Catalan Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2020) The rich have no concern for the poor. Or rather they live in their gilded mansions, eating expensive food, buying designer clothes, and traveling to exotic places, while … Continued
(Shropshire, EN: Platypus Press, 2020) I discovered Joseph Fasano, author of the new novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, as a poet. A few years back, I read some of his verse, and more recently I heard him … Continued
(Sefton Park, Australia: Everytime Press) She had inky black skin with matching pupils that seemed to take up her entire eye. Her voice – like the devil. Her walk – unbalanced. Like her body it felt foreign. Clearly, to Davon … Continued
(Spokane, Washington: Lynx House Press, 2019) Already it is mid-July, four months into a global pandemic with no end in sight. From my fifth-floor balcony, I can see Freedom Tower. The infection rate in Hoboken remains uncharacteristically low for the … Continued
(San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2019) Forgotten Journey, Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan The Promise, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell There’s a peculiar imbalance between Forgotten Journey and The Promise, the first … Continued
(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2020) One night after three am, Carol Ann Davis holds her sleeping seven-year-old boy, Luke, as he shutters and mumbles from night terrors, “My boy wakes repeating I don’t know I don’t know.” After he … Continued
(Kingston, WA, Two Sylvias Press, 2019) The clusterfuck that is the year 2020 continues, unabated, and I again am reaching for poetry. I suppose poetry is a de facto litmus test for my fractured attention. If I can read a … Continued
(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2019) You don’t so much open this book as you step into it. In this pocket-size creation from Tupelo Press, featuring the arresting illustrations of Lavinia Hanachiuc, Katie Farris seduces us into an uncanny dimension … Continued
(Frankfurt, KY: Broadstone Books, 2019) There certainly is a need for fantasy in our culture. Fantasy novels, sci-fi novels, manga, anime, adult fantasy fiction and films, fan fiction — the list runs like a stream into an ever-growing groundswell of … Continued
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2020) Sejal Shah and I have two things in common. We both grew up in the New York/New Jersey area and pursued writing in college. This is about the extent of the similarities between … Continued
(Seattle, WA: Wave Books: 2019) Earlier this year, @KylePlantEmoji tweeted: Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don’t. As in, some people’s thoughts are like sentences they “hear,” and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and … Continued
(Brooklyn, NY: 7.13 Books, 2020) Over the last few months, our sense of reality has dramatically changed. The world first shifted with a global pandemic, followed by tremors of protest against police brutality and racial injustice which jolted many out … Continued
(Vine Leaves Press, 2019) Million Dollar Red is a Dickensian tale, a tough story about a tender girl. It is presented as a memoir though the first name of the author is Gleah and the protagonist’s name is Linda, but, … Continued
(Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 2019) The desert: a place of strange, spiked plants and long, sandy distances. Even today in the age of air conditioners and running water, it’s not exactly a place that welcomes human life. It is … Continued
(New York: Knopf, 2020) “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s.” Thus remarks the narrator in the opening pages of Irish author Maggie … Continued
(Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2020) Heather Lang-Cassera: Dylan, thank you for chatting with me about your exquisite novella, The Loneliest Band in France, the 2019 winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize! Might you please share what sparked this lovely, lyrical book? … Continued