Issues

NEW DIRECTIONS, JULY 2023, 96 PP. THE ROAD TO the City is, at face value, apolitical. In an afterword from 1964, when Natalia Ginzburg was forty-eight, she describes the conception and creation of this, her first published book: “And I remembered how my mother, whenever she read a novel that was too long and tedious, would say, ‘What a blathering bore!’ […] I felt the impulse to write  something my mother might like. So, to

MCD X FSG ORIGINALS, JUNE 2022, 320 PP. “IF YOU CAN stand it, I’m going to describe a six-second video.” Kaitlyn Tiffany opens her engaging and persuasive book on online fandom with an apology and a question. She’s about to immerse you in the pleasures of Internet culture, and what she’s asking is: Can you come with her? Will you let her remember the in-jokes of the years she spent as a fan, and do

  CATAPULT, MAY 2022, 224 PP. Pyae Moe Thet War’s debut begins and ends with writing. A collection of winding, looping personal essays, You’ve Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar follows a writer’s coming-of-age, threading through small revelations as Moe Thet War reconciles her life and her art. Anchoring each piece is her lifelong ambition to write; as a child, she drags her mother to bookstores, attends a summer writing camp, and

MCD January 2022, 224 pp. The dedication of Morgan Thomas’s debut fiction collection Manywhere reads, “For Bea, who introduced me to Frank, and for anyone who’s gone looking for themselves in the archives.” That spirit of searching drives this keen and coruscating set of nine short stories centered on Southern queer and genderqueer people, all of them pursuing or creating traces of themselves in history and myth, lore and legacy. The word archive in the

BALLANTINE BOOKS, JULY 2022, 368 PP. IF ART ALLOWS humans to touch the sublime, then one can’t help but ask where we went so wrong with art school, that expensive immersion in the petty and profane. Two recent debut novels recreate the world of visual and literary arts programs replete with the glittering currency of gossip and connections, the students who nourish their envy and grievances as much as their talent, and the professors who

GROVE ATLANTIC, JULY 2022, 356 PP. HORROR IS A genre full of feminist potential. In a talk at the 2020 Horror of the Humanities, an annual Halloween event hosted by DePaul University, philosophy professor and Humanities Center Director H. Peter Steeves made the point that horror is an excellent vehicle for feminist messages and interpretations, its plots often hinging on a disbelieved woman. The female protagonist is the only one who perceives how screwed up

  PENGUIN PRESS, APRIL 2022, 128 PP. In February, I attended a reading by the poet Ocean Vuong in New York. There were dozens of us gathered, diligently masked and packed shoulder to shoulder, as he arrived at the podium and opened his new book, Time Is a Mother. His voice was familiarly haunting and incantatory as he read new poems to an audience rippling with nods and soft murmurs, the usual somber reverence of

  Seal Press, February 2022, 304 pp I once saw Grace Lavery do a reading—more like what comedians call a tight five—and it killed. The text of that performance is in Please Miss, but it didn’t work for me on the page. I wanted to love this book but didn’t. And so I find myself in the awkward position of having to explain my mixed reactions to a book by a trans sister, one whose

Naudline Pierre, Tell Me Where it Hurts, Oil on canvas, 66 x 48 in., 2020. ©Naudline Pierre, 2023. Images courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. ONCE, WHILE VISITING a friend who studied architecture in the Italian Alps, I tagged along on a field trip to the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana just across the Swiss border. Looking out a facade of glass onto the Lago di Lugano, hemmed in by tapered mountains,

KNOPF, JUNE 2022, 240 PP. WHAT SORT OF novel is Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl? This is not an easily answered question, and I suspect it may depend somewhat on the mood of the reader. A book with girl in the title signals a page-turner, and Hurricane Girl does compel us with sex, violence, the open question of whether the heroine will be all right. As in psychological thrillers, it is not always clear whether the