By Emily May Anderson Trances of the Blast’s title and its epigraph from the Book of Revelation conjure apocalypse, the blast from which we can hardly expect to recover. The book seldom deals with literal blasts, however, instead focusing on small everyday explosions...
By Paul Vangelisti
As poets may look for languages to think in, some fiction writers search out new contexts to subject to prose. Thus inciting the necessary friction between writing and the world one imagines.
By Patrick James Dunagan Tiff Dressen, Todd Melicker, and Joseph Noble will read from their work on the following: Wednesday, March 26, 7pm Canessa Park Reading Series, Canessa Gallery 708 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, California The Canessa Park building is in...
By Heather Mackey
Short enough to be read in one sitting, Severina by Guatemalan master Rodrigo Rey Rosa lingers disproportionately long in the imagination.
By Ho Lin
“Suddenly the front door swung open, and in walked…” This incomplete sentence, which occurs a third of the way into Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s delightful Definitely Maybe, is a tease, a taunt, and a mission statement.
By Emily May Anderson
The poems in Soul in Space, Noelle Kocot’s sixth collection, spark across its pages like synapses firing in the brain.
By Ho Lin
The word “fuck” is deployed fast and furious by Filiberto García in Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy — easily hundreds of times — and given that Filiberto is a public dick whose Christian name also means “dick,” this all might seem excessive to certain discerning readers.
Review by Heather Mackey
Sometimes it’s hard to call a book “promising,” with all that the word connotes of amiability. Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon’s debut novel Nothing is as promising as a rattlesnake.
By Daniel Shank Cruz
As its subtitle indicates, Ewuare X. Osayande’s anthology Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin & Marissa Alexander attempts to make space for poetry within the fractious public discourse surrounding two recent examples of race-related legal injustice.
By Karen An-hwei Lee
If I could sing well enough — or play acoustic guitar, for that matter — I would sing Xi Chuan’s early lyric poems in a quiet studio with a swept parquet floor.
By Daniel Shank CruzIn Somewhere Near Defiance, his sixth full-length collection of poems, Jeff Gundy is at the top of his game. The book revisits Gundy’s usual catalog of subjects — small-town life in the Midwest, nature, Mennonites, being on the road, and so on —...
By Diego BáezDonna Tartt has turned out a single novel every decade, starting with her bestselling debut, The Secret History (1992), a semi-autobiographical “murder mystery in reverse” about students at a small private school in Vermont. The Little Friend (2002)...
Review by Caitlin Callaghan
“He just wanted to live his dream of dying in Paris.” So says one of the new housemates of Leticia “Lita” del Cielo on her first morning as a new tenant in the House of Stars, a run-down mansion on the Left Bank in which well-moneyed—or “green-blooded”—young women board year by year.
By Patrick James Dunagan
I first encountered poems by Jack Spicer in Don Allen’s anthology New American Poetry, however, his work didn’t immediately strike my fancy at the time.
By Nancy Smith
Only a few paragraphs into This Is Between Us, it becomes clear that this is an intimate portrait of a relationship. A narrator speaks, perhaps confesses, directly to his lover of five years, and we get to peek inside the everyday details of this romance.
By Caitlin Callaghan
Early on in Jamie Ford’s new novel, Songs of Willow Frost, William Eng, the twelve year-old protagonist, is about to run away from Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage with his best friend, Charlotte.
By Patrick James Dunagan Both prolific and diverse, Russell Atkins’ literary output crosses over traditional divisions of genre, style, and form. He has drafted musical scores for many of his literary works and theorized his original theory of practice in his essay "A...
By Daniel Shank Cruz Penelope Scambly Schott’s sixth full-length poetry collection, Lillie was a goddess, Lillie was a whore, examines prostitution throughout history. The title character appears in different manifestations throughout the book and is named after the...
By Patrick James Dunagan
Will Alexander astounds. Prolific beyond any easily understandable degree, poems, plays, novels, philosophical tracts, and artwork endlessly pour forth from him—I even recently witnessed him play piano in a San Francisco performance with the Cloud Shepherd ensemble accompanied by jazz violinist India Cooke.