Percival Everett’s ’Telephone’ Offers a Timely Lesson
Telephone provides a case study of a family dynamic shaken by illness, what can be controlled, and what must be accepted.
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‘In the Dream House’ Nothing Will Change — Until Something Erupts
Folk tales, fantasy, pop culture and family weave gracefully throughout Carmen Maria Machado's harrowing yet graceful memoir of domestic abuse, In the Dream House.
Jess Row’s ‘White Flights’ Examines Avoidant Rituals of Race in American Literature
"White flights" for Jess Row denotes the "postures of avoidance and denial" about whiteness — as a privilege, a cultural norm, and a burden — adopted by white authors, academics, and critics.
Two Fascist Perspectives on WWII: The Colonel’s Wife and Deviation
Authors Rosa Liksom and Luce D'Eramo brilliantly convey the seduction and willful disbelief associated with fascism; how one brushes off their misgivings, thinking that it will be different for them.
Progress Is Not Linear, as ‘The House of the Pain of Others’ Reminds Us with Devastating Effect
Julián Herbert's The House of the Pain of Others is a masterly study that sheds light on the role played by educated elites in fomenting genocide.
‘She Would Be King’, an Afrofuturist Novel of Nation-Making in Liberia
Wayétu Moore's She Would Be King is an important exploration of power, identity, and belonging at a major historical junction in African diasporic and Liberian history.
Alyson Hagy’s ‘Scribe’ Is Gloriously Artful, but Something Is Missing
Hagy's new novel, Scribe, a beautiful work clearly rooted in the ethos of the Program Era, seems the very example of a return to the bourgeois novel of art for art's sake.
‘Children of God’ Offers a Dark, Norwegian Treatment of the Jesus Story
Bleak and just barely inspirational, Lars Petter Sveen's Children of God is a story well attuned to these dark times.
Drive, She Said: Dorthe Nors’ ‘Mirror, Shoulder, Signal’
Nors provides an informative and careful sort of journalism here that captures the thought patterns of humans in the throes of anxiety and self-pity.
It Doesn’t Always Get Better: Patrick Nathan’s ‘Some Hell’
Nathan explores the hyperbolic mind of the teenager, a time bomb of unresolved emotion that can be unleashed at any perceived slight, no matter how minor.