Robin Talley Inkyard Press ($18.99) by Helena Ducusin Tremendous progress has been made in the past several decades in the realm of LGBTQ+ rights and representation. Because of this, it can be easy for younger readers to feel disconnected from the history of overt discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. Robin Talley’s historical fiction novel Music […]
Laura Elrick The Elephants ($15) by David Brazil In an interview about the 1979 film Alien, director Ridley Scott stated that he understood the events of that film to be set in the same world as the urban dystopia of Blade Runner. With such classics of science fiction and apocalyptic cinema feeling especially relevant during […]
Molly Aitken Vintage ($16) by Jane Ainslie In The Island Child, Molly Aitken’s first novel, readers are taken to a barren, Irish island, where only America lies beyond the horizon. It may be the 1980s, but Inis is a place where idols of Jesus and the Virgin Mary live alongside tales of selkies and faerie […]
Trung Le Nguyen RH Graphic ($16.99) by Stephanie Burt The Magic Fish is everything. Or—in a less colloquial, wordier way—The Magic Fish is everything I want at the moment in a graphic novel, especially in one meant for both kids and adults to read. This first narrative work from the accomplished Minnesota-based illustrator Trung Le […]
Sigutė Chlebinskaitė, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, and Nissan N. Perez, eds. Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius (€34) by M. Kasper Exquisitely designed, printed, and slipcased, this two-volume set includes a hardbound facsimile of The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, a masterpiece of book art from 1931, along with a companion paperback of bilingual essays. Deservedly, it […]
Interviewed by Lawrence Welsh About twenty-four years ago, an English professor in West Texas named Tom Casey gifted me his first edition copy of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia. I knew of the book, but I had never read it. Over the years, I’ve pored over it time and […]
A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry Edited by Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise Foerster W.W. Norton & Company ($19.95) by Mike Dillon In 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the US. Census bureau announced the closing of the U.S. frontier. Manifest Destiny had done its work. The American narrative, which […]
Chelsea G. Summers Unnamed Press ($26) by Eleanor Stern “People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of […]
James Smethurst University of Massachusetts Press ($26.95) by Patrick James Dunagan Poet Amiri Baraka belted out revolutionary truth to counter political bullshit, his sharp critique always blistering listener’s ears unlike any other. If it has, at times in the last four years, felt like some stringent poetic analysis has been missing, there is good reason. […]
by Zhanna Slor What does it mean to be Jewish in the modern world? This is a question I found myself asking while reading Melanie Conroy-Goldman’s debut novel, The Likely World (Red Hen Press, $18.95), which I discovered in an online Jewish writers’ group last fall. The book, which deals with familiar themes about Jewish […]