Alexandra Chang Ecco ($26.99) by Bethany Catlin It’s 2013. Zhang Jing researches, pitches, and submits a review of Sheryl Sandberg’s neo-feminist tome, Lean In. A male editor mauls it, demolishing the nuance of Jing’s review, which she finds published the next day under a simpering title without ever getting her approval. Instead of a thoughtful […]

Editor’s Note: To celebrate the publication of Matthew Rohrer’s new book The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, $16), Dobby Gibson and Matthew Rohrer were scheduled to converse in the Twin Cities this past April. With that event cancelled for obvious reasons, we asked them to have a conversation anyway, and what follows below is […]

Lydia Davis Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($30) by John Toren Unlike those literary artists who begin to write under the compulsion to give form to personal experiences or complex social situations, Lydia Davis seems to have been driven by nothing more than the desire to be a writer. As she confesses, Both my parents . […]

Barry Alfonso Backbeat Books ($29.95) by Walter Holland Singer-songwriter-poet Rod McKuen was a strange, self-conflicted, and tragic figure; an artist of frenetic creativity, he was also a closeted gay man who became trapped in his illusory pop persona as a mellow, lovelorn, balladeer and bard. His complexities do not lend themselves to easy narrative, and […]

Kekla Magoon Henry Holt ($18.99) by George Longenecker Although young Black people have often been the victims of police shootings, their voices have been seldom heard in young adult literature. Kekla Magoon is part of a wave of writers changing that. Her novel Light it Up follows up her earlier novel, How it Went Down, […]

Mindy McGinnis Katherine Tegen Books ($18.99) by Olivia Vengel If you chop off your own foot in a possibly abandoned meth lab in the wilderness and no one is there to hear you scream, are you still whole? Seasoned YA author Mindy McGinnis’s novel, Be Not Far From Me, explores woman versus nature against a […]

Novelists Susan M. Gaines and Jean Hegland have been exchanging and discussing drafts of their books for nearly thirty years. Earlier this year, they found themselves sheltering in place together in Jean and her husband’s northern California home. At the beginning of March, Susan traveled from Germany, where she has been living and working for […]

Katherine Hollander The Waywiser Press ($17) by John Bradley A book of poetry can sometimes function as a time machine, and that’s what happens with My German Dictionary. “I couldn’t be / a good historian,” Hollander confesses in the opening poem, “Confession (Invitation),” “so I wrote poems.” These poems take us to Europe in the […]

C.J. Hauser Anchor Books ($16) by Jeremiah Moriarty In Family of Origin, C.J. Hauser’s wistful second novel, a family’s troubled past—and their attempts to reckon with it—provide a frame for much larger questions around fighting inevitable failures, the long shadow of parental rejection, and the looming climate catastrophe. It’s a story about losing your way […]

INTERVIEWS: Poetry Flowing Everywhere: An Interview with Trapeta B. Mayson The City of Philadelphia’s current Poet Laureate, Trapeta B. Mayson is a Liberian-born poet whose work focuses on the political and personal immigrant experience. Interviewed by John Wall Barger Poetry Breaks Through the Silence: A Conversation with Ed Bok Lee and Steve Healey Two Twin […]