Blog – Page 19 of 116

‘The Boy with a Bird in His Chest’ by Emme Lund: Like the Best Fables

by Maura Krause

April 5, 2022

Posted on April 5, 2022 (April 4, 2022) by Zack Ravas

The last few years have seen queer and trans literature receive a long-overdue upswing in both publication and attention. Emme Lund’s first novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest (320 pages; Atria Books), takes a well-earned place among its siblings, while shimmering brightly with its own unique brilliance. Lund’s lyrical and fabulist-leaning tale is the story of Owen Tanner, a boy with a java sparrow living in a hole behind his ribs. Born during the worst spring flood in Morning, Montana, Owen is supposed to be lucky. Yet the beginning of his life seems anything but. According to […]

The Bully of Columbus

by Tom Barbash

March 29, 2022

Posted on March 29, 2022 (March 28, 2022) by Zack Ravas

“You’re gonna get your ass kicked,” the greasy haired bully said.He said it every time I saw him, which was once or twice a week when I was coming back from therapy, or on my way back from school. I was 16 then.“Ass kicked,” he called out once I’d passed him on Columbus Avenue, like he

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The Third Daughter

by Vanessa Hua

March 15, 2022

Posted on March 15, 2022 (March 14, 2022) by Zack Ravas

The Chairman is dead. Outside, the people of Chinatown are cheering. They light firecrackers and beat pots and pans, chanting as they march three floors below the window of my apartment. Their signs say, “Smash the Emperor!” Drips of paint spoil the sweep and curve of the calligraphy, the characters bleeding as if shot.Shouts and

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 5—Jacqueline Susann

by Sean Gill

March 11, 2022

Posted on March 11, 2022 (March 11, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Q: “Which is the product, you or the book?” JS: “Way back… the author, the successful author, sold himself, only we didn’t have the media. If you recall, Ernest Hemingway… there was always great publicity, how he was a great white hunter, how he went to the bullring… and so you sort of almost mixed the man with his character, they said, ‘That’s really Hemingway.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, he and his wife, Zelda, lived the same kind of flamboyant life in the south of France as the kind of Americans they wrote about. And then along came television, and the […]

Everyone Has a Dead Father

by Matthew Zapruder

March 8, 2022

Posted on March 8, 2022 (March 8, 2022) by Zack Ravas

The road from Chicago to Iowa City is straight, about three and a half hours due west. In 2004, I was on my way from a reading at a bookstore in Chicago to one in Iowa City, the famed Prairie Lights. About halfway there, I pulled into a rest stop and saw I had missed

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‘Customs’ by Solmaz Sharif: The Complicity of Speech

by Ray Levy Uyeda

March 3, 2022

Posted on March 3, 2022 (March 2, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Solmaz Sharif’s second collection of poetry, Customs (104 pages; Graywolf Press), interrogates the English language and its role in shaping America. English was the language used to write the U.S. Constitution, enslave kidnapped West Africans, and free enslaved African Americans; it’s the language used to go to war and used to achieve liberation. Customs inspects language itself as a device for colonization and country-making, which in this land is the same. The collection, split into three sections, begins with a poem called “America.” Eighteen lines composed of 12 sentences, each sentence three words long, the poem appears almost like a […]

Shelter

by Kate Folk

February 28, 2022

Posted on February 28, 2022 (February 28, 2022) by Zack Ravas

In the basement of the house in Iowa that Reese and Mark were renting for summer, there was a concrete vault, eight-by-five-feet, presumably built as a storm shelter. Reese stored the house’s Shop-Vac there, along with a box of Carr’s rosemary crackers and a crate of wine shipped from their friends’ vineyard in Sonoma. Beyond

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‘Tell Me I’m Worthless’ by Alison Rumfitt: A Necessary Resistance

by Supriya Saxena

February 23, 2022

Posted on February 23, 2022 (February 22, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Powerful and disturbing in equal measure, Alison Rumfitt’s first novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless (260 pages; Cipher Press), uses a story about a haunted house (known as the House) to investigate the rise of fascist movements in current-day Britain and the trauma they inflict. The novel, which was published in the U.K. last October but is available to order online, examines the “gender-critical feminist” transphobic hate movement in Britain, the ways in which young people are recruited to fascist movements, and the deep-seated hypocrisy of many who consider themselves progressive—all while spinning a chilling horror tale. Alice and Ila were […]

Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 4—Mickey Spillane

by Sean Gill

February 18, 2022

Posted on February 18, 2022 (February 18, 2022) by Zack Ravas

1963 Mickey Spillane is “Mike Hammer” “When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought about what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book, reading about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences… But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics… All you have to […]

‘Dead Winter’ by Matvei Yankelevich: Winter on the Page

by Chiara Bercu

February 16, 2022

Posted on February 16, 2022 (February 15, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Matvei Yankelevich’s latest poetry collection, Dead Winter (40 pages; Fonograf Editions), is a wheeling and melancholic address to winter as a mimetic object. “My task, my cross—to reassemble winter’s/ memory,” Yankelevich states in one the earliest of his twenty-seven poems. He meets this attempt to capture winter on the page by mounting an inquiry into the season as a site of recursion, ungovernability, and wasting. Yankelevich pictures winter as an “abandon” forever short of expression. Within “imagined limits,” winter appears to modulate time in an alternately moldering and propulsive manner: “Of/ course, one can look out a window, one/ can […]

‘Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century’ by Kim Fu: Surrealism for Our Times

by Maura Krause

February 11, 2022

Posted on February 11, 2022 (February 11, 2022) by Zack Ravas

As the planet careens into 2022, surrealism might be the best way to capture our psyche. Kim Fu’s first story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (220 pages; Tin House Books), makes a convincing argument for such an idea. Without referencing any specific events or cultural moments, the twelve pieces in Fu’s aptly titled fourth book capture a wide swath of modern maladies. In a recent interview with The Rumpus, Fu stated she wanted in her work to take “speculative ideas very seriously and at face value…without a winking eye to metaphor.” Remarkably, she succeeds, avoiding the pitfalls […]

Q&A with Sindya Bhanoo: ‘Seeking Fortune Elsewhere’ and the Immigrant Story

by Supriya Saxena

February 8, 2022

Posted on February 8, 2022 (February 11, 2022) by Zack Ravas

Sindya Bhanoo’s story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere (240 pages; Catapult), follows the lives of South Indian immigrants and their families, focusing on the women in these communities and how they deal with the hardships that come their way. While exploring the bitter realities of her characters’ circumstances, Bhanoo captures both the tenacity and tender humanity of her protagonists. Bhanoo’s fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A longtime newspaper reporter, she has worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and lives in […]