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‘All Adults Here’ by Emma Straub: The Politics of Respectability

by Cade Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Emma Straub’s delightful third novel, All Adults Here (368 pages; Riverhead Books), takes place in Clapham, a fictional Hudson Valley town. It’s a small, white, and affluent community that is both a getaway for New Yorkers and a reservoir for elite Brooklynite culture. A roundabout sits in the center of town (a commercial hotspot where an obtrusive, geometric, and vacant building houses a threat: the possibility of a chain store opening in Clapham). Residents circle through downtown like clockwork until one day a school bus kills longtime resident Barbara Baker right before matriarch Astrid Strick’s eyes, sending atriggering repressed memory […]

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‘August’ by Callan Wink: The Struggle of Youth

by Jesse Bedayn

Posted on by Zack Ravas

August (304 pages; Random House), Callan Wink’s first novel and second book following his story collection, Dog Run Moon, opens on a collection of cat tails chopped from tabby corpses in a Michigan barn. The 12-year-old boy responsible for this violence, the titular August, is paid per tail, proof he’s killed a feral cat. And so Wink launches us into a turbulent coming-of-age story punctuated by donuts performed drunk outside a Hutterite colony and the pregnant pauses on the phone between the protagonist and his emotionally distant father. While August’s inner turmoil is often opaque, the novel offers an uncannily sympathetic […]

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‘And Their Children After Them’ by Nicolas Mathieu: A Disaffected Life

by CJ Green

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Recounting four summers in the life of a teenager, Nicolas Mathieu’s new novel, And Their Children After Them (420 pages; Other Press; translated by William Rodarmor), is a testament to what words can do at their leanest. The opening reads as check list: “Anthony had just turned fourteen…His parents were jerks. When school started he would be in ninth grade.” When Anthony and his cousin (never named) are “bored out of their skulls,” they paddle over to a nude beach where they find not nudists, but peers, girls their own age—and yes, out of their league. The novel proceeds in […]

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Cathedral: Some Marginalia on Reading

by Paisley Rekdal

Posted on by me

“It’s okay to be white,” reads the sign posted in November by the Social Work building on the University of Utah campus where I teach. White poster, fine black letters in Arial font. The sign disappears in a day, though photos are taken, passed via social media. Two posters with the slogan “Stop the Rapes, Stop the Crime, Stop the Murder, Stop the Blacks” are then taped up, each with a web address for the manifesto “Blood and Soil” written by Vanguard America. These, too, are torn down. Someone spray-paints racist epithets on a campus construction site. This is not […]

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‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett: A Lonely Gift

by Cade Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Brit Bennett’s second novel, The Vanishing Half (352 pages; Riverhead Books), is an enthralling addition to the literature of passing: novels about taking on an alternative racial identity that often explore the concept of race as performance. The Vanishing Half is powered by its reflections on deception, motherhood, and love, and where they intersect. Whereas other novels about passing, such as James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, focus on the arbitrariness of racial constructs, Bennett’s novel studies the self-inflicted psychological and social repercussions of passing and the alienation of self. Beginning in the 1960s, the […]

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‘Hurricane Season’ by Fernanda Melchor: Taboo of the Witch

by CJ Green

Posted on by Zack Ravas

More than once did I consider abandoning Hurricane Season (224 pages; New Directions; translated by Sophia Hughes), Fernanda Melchor’s first novel. Sentences are pages long, and the ones that are not are often fragments. Many times I lost my place. I could barely see through the imagery, which is torrential yet constantly vivid. Even so, I turned its final page after only a few sittings. The story begins with a body. The Witch, she is called. Discovered by five boys wading through a canal, she lies floating beneath a “myriad of black snakes, smiling.” From there the next seven chapters […]

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Love, Longing, and Loss: Scott Spencer’s Journey to the Far Shores of Emotion

by Paul Wilner

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Reading Scott Spencer’s work is an adventure in negative capability—an opportunity to fall, or dive, into a deeper world beyond good and evil, reason and faith, will and fate. The love, and acceptance he feels for his characters is endless, though not without a deep understanding of the many flaws— narcissism, inconstancy, faithlessness, greed—that flesh is heir to. His latest novel, An Ocean Without A Shore (341 pages; Ecco Press), is a sequel of sorts to River Under the Road (2017), which took a hard look at the multiple misfortunes of Thaddeus Kaufman, a struggling novelist and screenwriter manqué, living […]

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‘New Waves’ by Kevin Nguyen: Adapt or Be Left Behind

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Sometimes it seems as as though authors go out of their way to select the most academic or arcane-sounding quote (the older, the better) to serve as the preamble to their novel. Not so with Kevin Nguyen’s first novel, New Waves (303 pages; One World). The book opens with a familiar quote from the classic 1986 Nintendo game Legend of Zelda, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this,” which clues in readers to the millennial voice of this novel—warm, inviting, unpretentious—and underscores one of the themes of the book, that of friendship and solidarity, including the makeshift families we sometimes […]

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‘Little Family’ by Ishmael Beah: A Family Living in the Shadows

by Cade Johnson

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Ishmael Beah’s new book, the novel Little Family (272 Pages; Riverhead Books), tells the story of a chosen family whose companionship and commitment to each other replaces their lost homes, working as an antidote to the slanted and violent institutional structures of a post-colonial nation. The story takes place in an unnamed African country, details about which indicate Beah’s native Sierra Leone, where bribery, political corruption, and class disparities characterize the social order. Beah’s understated storytelling gives the family’s camaraderie and mutual understanding the subtle warmth of ever-glowing embers.  Elimane, the book-smart, eldest member of the group, reads Shakespeare and […]

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‘Little Constructions’ by Anna Burns: The Brink of Madness

by Alicia Long

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Little Constructions (304 pages; Graywolf Press), Anna Burns’ second novel, but her most recent to be published in the U.S. following the success of her Man Booker Prize-winning Milkman, breaks into a run from its opening pages. Things at the former-best-gun shop in the town of Tiptoe Floorboard are looking a bit dicey as two men named Tom are pitted against the angry and quite likely murderous Jetty Doe. Jetty storms in like she owns the place, steals a gun, steals the wrong bullets for said gun, and then storms back out, impatiently hailing a taxi. As Jetty rides away […]

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‘Sleeping with Strangers’ by David Thomson: In Great Company

by Zack Ravas

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Reading the latest book by acclaimed film critic David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire (348 pages; Vintage), now out in paperback, one can’t help but suspect the book’s thesis may have changed over the course of its writing. A mixture of memoir, criticism, and film theory (“Why am I giving you history and memoir?” Thomson asks early on. “Because you cannot get close to movies without grasping the mindset in which they were received. When you go to the movies, you take your history with you. The fantasy is about you.”), the book was prompted by […]

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Distance and Richard Serra’s ‘Ballast’

by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Ones of life’s pleasures is staring at something interesting, especially if it is also beautiful. And so I am bereft now that the museums and galleries are all closed. In response to shelter-in place, many museums are enhancing their virtual experiences. But I’ve yet to explore any of these offerings because the internet is full of horrors, and I feel the need to spend my leisure time away from my screen. I’m lucky to live near the UCSF Mission Bay Campus, which houses many works of outdoor art, including Richard Serra’s Ballast (2005). This piece has never felt more timely. […]

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