‘Bliss Montage Is a Surrealistic Meditation on the Human Condition
Ling Ma’s short story collection, Bliss Montage, brilliantly explores the absurdity and alienation of living under late-stage capitalism.
literary fiction
Dare You Enter Jennifer Egan’s Mind Palace ‘The Candy House’?
Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is an EDM concert, a prestige drama, a mind palace – and a warning.
Debut Novel ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ Brims with Menace
Ariel Delgado Dixon’s compulsively readable debut novel, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, explores what it means to cope with a shared, painful past.
Will the Film Capture the Artfulness of ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’?
With its film adaptation releasing this summer, the best-seller Where the Crawdads Sing calls a reader to open themselves to places and people on the edge.
Marcial Gala’s ‘Call Me Cassandra’ Revolts Against Gender Constraints
In Call Me Cassandra, Marcial Gala dismantles the suffocating binary of unyielding machismo in pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.
Missouri Williams’ ‘The Doloriad’ Pulls Itself Along the Ground
Missouri Williams’ ‘The Doloriad’ is a perverse tale of human remnants scratching out a bare survival like a lone pine twisting out of a stony cliff.
Alejandro Zambra’s ‘Chilean Poet’ Is a Tender Ode to Parents and Language
In ‘Chilean Poet’, Alejandro Zambra reaches the sublime through descriptions of everyday routine amongst family members – however they describe themselves.
For Don DeLillo, ‘The Silence’ Is Deafening
In Don DeLillo’s The Silence, it is much like our post-pandemic life – everything changed but nothing happened. Are we listening?
Privacy and Alt-Right Transhumanism in Hari Kunzru’s ‘Red Pill’
Kunzru excels in capturing the geist in alt-right circles in his latest work, Red Pill, from the callous philosophy down to the very language.
‘Yours, Jean’ Is a Perfect Mixture of Tragedy, Repressed Desire, and Poor Impulse Control
Lee Martin's Yours, Jean is a perfectly balanced and heartbreaking mix of true crime narrative and literary fiction.
New Translation of Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions’ Captivates
More than just a tale of one man's fall, Balzac's Lost Illusions charts how literature becomes another commodity in a system that demands backroom deals, moral compromise, and connections.
Short Stories: Beginnings and Endings
These five short stories—by Naguib Mahfouz, Carmen Maria Machado, Niven Govinden, Margaret Atwood, and Wole Talabi—are about new beginnings. They're also about those unsettling endings that aren't really endings.
