By Abeer Hoque “People are never as afraid as their rulers think they should be,” Vic said. “Every regime finds this out the hard way.” Chaitali Sen’s debut novel The Pathless Sky is remarkable for its assured and intense politics and intimacy. John and...
By Abeer Hoque
“One can tell instinctively what sort of flower a person would be if born a plant.”
The Door is the plainspoken eloquent and devastating novel by Hungarian great, Magda Szabó (translated by Len Rix).
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
In Dimitris Lyacos’s The First Death densely layered fragments fluidly reference the Bible and Classical Greek literature. The white space around these passages heighten the stark sense of loneliness present in the book.
by Abeer Hoque“By May 16, a surge of newly installed floodlights lit up the east side like a Christmas tree. In one house tambourines were tied to every door and window. Hammers went under pillows. Nearly 3000 guns were sold in Sacramento County between January and...
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot is an atmospheric novel. At times, the endemic decay of the environment dominates the lives and movements of the characters.
By Abeer HoqueSofija Stefanovic’s wry and thoughtful memoir Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is about growing up across Serbian and Australian cultures. It takes place as the country of her birth, Yugoslavia, slowly and brutally disintegrates. She’s an introverted anxious child,...
By Kelly Flynn
Being able to categorize and appropriately label things is comforting to most people. Tatiana Ryckman’s genre bending novella, I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) does not allow its reader to neatly place it in a particular box.
By Abeer Hoque“Anger is easier than shame.”Ayobami Adebayo’s debut novel Stay With Me is the stunning story of Yejide and Akin. They are a young married Yoruba couple living in Ilesa, a southwestern town in Nigeria. Although the two are madly in love, their failed...
By Abeer Hoque
“How time plays its jokes. It raises dwarves and hobbles giants.”
Nadifa Mohamed’s second novel The Orchard of Lost Souls is a gorgeous harrowing story of Somalia’s war-torn history as seen through the eyes of three very different women in the city of Hargeisa.
By Nicholas Alexander HayesI was listening to a well-known author speak when the subject of Alain Robbe-Grillet came up. The author dismissed Robbe-Grillet by saying something like when you’ve read that work you really feel like you’ve put in some effort. And I find...
By Elicia ParkinsonThe Santa Fe Writers Project has been home to the published works of many authors since 2002 when founding member Andrew Gifford began the SFWP Journal, the online literary journal component. The journal, now called the SFWP Quarterly, prints the...
By Abeer HoqueHer Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s brilliant first book, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards. It is a collection of dark, beautiful (and sometimes supernatural) stories about women. Machado’s prose is stunning and erotic, her...
Review by Abeer Y. Hoque
“Stolen bodies working stolen land”
I’ve been fjording my way slowly through the 2017 Booker long list this summer.
By Abeer Y. Hoque “Our hopes are coiled up so tight as to be deadly, or holy.”I have highly enjoyed George Saunders’ essays and nonfiction but hadn't read any of his highly acclaimed fiction until the Booker long-listed Lincoln in the Bardo. Although he has written a...
By Nicholas Alexander HayesIn Yoshio Aramaki’s The Sacred Era we are presented with a common trope of a young male hero who is part of a quasi-theocratic, interstellar empire. In order to fulfill his destiny, he must challenge both the existing political order and the...
By Abeer Hoque“We are all migrants through time.”Mohsin Hamid’s 4th novel Exit West like much of his work reflects and refracts our troubled times. The book follows two young lovers, Nadia and Saeed, from an unnamed country that is being torn apart by civil war. Their...
By Nicholas Alexander HayesThe summer after I returned from the Peace Corps, I sat outside of my favorite café in my home town, drinking hot coffee from a glass pint glass. I watched a couple of teen boys stare at their reflection in a florist’s window as they applied...
Review by Abeer Hoque
“His beauty was that his beauty was behind him, his appeal reflecting what he had already survived.”
Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers is a sprawling multi-generational story of working-class undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York City.
By Nicholas Alexander HayesJay Besemer and I once collaborated on a performance/workshop called “Restrictive Andragogies and Ex-Citation.” We were both at a stage in our teaching careers in which we were challenged by the way we were expected to approach our...
By Elicia ParkinsonHaving never read anything by Colin Dodds before and not knowing anything about this book before I received it, I have to admit I was startled by the beginning scenes of WATERSHED. What are these people doing on the airplane? Are they actually have...
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Peg Alford Pursell’s Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow lures the reader in with small wistful passages. They are wisps of prose that would seem to be easily consumed.
By Alvin Lu
“Not a poet-novelist,” a fictional Franz Kafka calls himself in Sonata in K. This hard-to-classify work about the misadventures of Kafka and a 38-year-old polyglot Japanese American interpreter named K in Los Angeles, Amerika’s weirdest city, is also poet Karen An-hwei Lee’s first novel.
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The beauty of a fragment is its transience. It is a tatter of what has been forgotten. The poetry of Sappho is beautiful (at least in the translations I have read.) But what has always struck me more is the poignant absence of the rest of the work.
Review by Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The titular poem of Kokumo’s collection Reacquainted with Life ends with the lines: “then find pride in where I lay/ wounded but alive.”
By Abeer HoqueThe Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is Mira Jacob’s debut novel about an immigrant South Asian girl growing up with feet in two worlds, reluctantly tied to the old country, inexorably to the new. It’s the book I’ve been wanting to read for years.The...
By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
The city dominates the narratives of queer literature. Radclyffe Hall sends the protagonist of The Well of Loneliness to find themselves in London and finally Paris.
By Elicia ParkinsonChris Campanioni writes in the chapter entitled Notes Written In Margins, “I am interested in the intersection between all the public interaction we have in private & the paradoxes which exist because of this divide in logic & space.”This...
By Elicia Parkinson
Most readers hear the word “metamorphosis” and think initially of Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis in which a man metamorphosizes into a cockroach.
By Nicholas Alexander HayesIn the atomic theory of the ancient Greeks, atoms moved freely throughout the void. They only begin to accumulate when one veers from its trajectory and knocks into another. The subtle process of swerving, collision and accumulation...
By Abeer Hoque The Fishermen is a magnificent debut novel by Nigerian writer Chijioke Obioma. It follows the lives of four young brothers: Ikenna (14), Boja (13), Obembe (11), and Ben (9). They are growing up in a small town in southwestern Nigeria although their Igbo...