‘When I Sing, Mountains Dance’ by Irene Solà: Trouble in the Landscape

by Maura Krause

In the age of the Anthropocene, Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (216 pages; Graywolf Press; translated by Mara Faye Lethem) is a salve. Its texture is smooth yet it’s laced with herbaceous pungency. In a magically rendered translation from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, Solà’s second novel offers up healing for those who care to find it. Set in the Pyrenees near Spain’s border with France, this marvelous book loosely traces one family’s tragedies and how they seep into the lives of others in their close-knit village. These troubles are refracted by the landscape, witnessed by unusual […]

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 6—Yukio Mishima

by Sean Gill

“I wrote ‘Patriotism’ from the point of view of the young officer who could not help choosing suicide because he could not take part in the Ni Ni Roku Incident. This is neither a comedy nor a tragedy but simply a story of happiness…To choose the place where one dies is also the greatest joy in life.” —Yukio Mishima, in a 1966 postscript to his short story, “Patriotism”  Army Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama sits on a Noh stage with his wife, Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka). The only real ornamentation in the spare white room is an enormous kakemono banner, bearing the Chinese […]

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‘Getting Clean with Stevie Green’ by Swan Huntley: A Decluttered Life

by Sophia Carr

These days, the story of a woman attempting to get her life together as she approaches middle age has become a familiar trope. However, Getting Clean with Stevie Green (304 pages; Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), the latest novel by Swan Huntley, feels unique even as it tells the story of thirty-seven-year-old Stevie’s journey to live the life she envisions for herself. This is no small task for Stevie, a professional in the cutthroat business of decluttering people’s homes, as she must deal with addiction and mental illness while coming to terms with her sexuality and navigating the  shifting dynamics of […]

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‘The Boy with a Bird in His Chest’ by Emme Lund: Like the Best Fables

by Maura Krause

The last few years have seen queer and trans literature receive a long-overdue upswing in both publication and attention. Emme Lund’s first novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest (320 pages; Atria Books), takes a well-earned place among its siblings, while shimmering brightly with its own unique brilliance. Lund’s lyrical and fabulist-leaning tale is the story of Owen Tanner, a boy with a java sparrow living in a hole behind his ribs. Born during the worst spring flood in Morning, Montana, Owen is supposed to be lucky. Yet the beginning of his life seems anything but. According to […]

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The Bully of Columbus

by Tom Barbash

“You’re gonna get your ass kicked,” the greasy haired bully said. He said it every time I saw him, which was once or twice a week when I was coming back from therapy, or on my way back from school. I was 16 then. “Ass kicked,” he called out once I’d passed him on Columbus Avenue,

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The Third Daughter

by Vanessa Hua

The Chairman is dead. Outside, the people of Chinatown are cheering. They light firecrackers and beat pots and pans, chanting as they march three floors below the window of my apartment. Their signs say, “Smash the Emperor!” Drips of paint spoil the sweep and curve of the calligraphy, the characters bleeding as if shot. Shouts

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 5—Jacqueline Susann

by Sean Gill

Q: “Which is the product, you or the book?” JS: “Way back… the author, the successful author, sold himself, only we didn’t have the media. If you recall, Ernest Hemingway… there was always great publicity, how he was a great white hunter, how he went to the bullring… and so you sort of almost mixed the man with his character, they said, ‘That’s really Hemingway.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, he and his wife, Zelda, lived the same kind of flamboyant life in the south of France as the kind of Americans they wrote about. And then along came television, and the […]

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Everyone Has a Dead Father

by Matthew Zapruder

The road from Chicago to Iowa City is straight, about three and a half hours due west. In 2004, I was on my way from a reading at a bookstore in Chicago to one in Iowa City, the famed Prairie Lights. About halfway there, I pulled into a rest stop and saw I had missed

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‘Customs’ by Solmaz Sharif: The Complicity of Speech

by Ray Levy Uyeda

Solmaz Sharif’s second collection of poetry, Customs (104 pages; Graywolf Press), interrogates the English language and its role in shaping America. English was the language used to write the U.S. Constitution, enslave kidnapped West Africans, and free enslaved African Americans; it’s the language used to go to war and used to achieve liberation. Customs inspects language itself as a device for colonization and country-making, which in this land is the same. The collection, split into three sections, begins with a poem called “America.” Eighteen lines composed of 12 sentences, each sentence three words long, the poem appears almost like a […]

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Shelter

by Kate Folk

In the basement of the house in Iowa that Reese and Mark were renting for summer, there was a concrete vault, eight-by-five-feet, presumably built as a storm shelter. Reese stored the house’s Shop-Vac there, along with a box of Carr’s rosemary crackers and a crate of wine shipped from their friends’ vineyard in Sonoma. Beyond

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‘Tell Me I’m Worthless’ by Alison Rumfitt: A Necessary Resistance

by Supriya Saxena

Powerful and disturbing in equal measure, Alison Rumfitt’s first novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless (260 pages; Cipher Press), uses a story about a haunted house (known as the House) to investigate the rise of fascist movements in current-day Britain and the trauma they inflict. The novel, which was published in the U.K. last October but is available to order online, examines the “gender-critical feminist” transphobic hate movement in Britain, the ways in which young people are recruited to fascist movements, and the deep-seated hypocrisy of many who consider themselves progressive—all while spinning a chilling horror tale.  Alice and Ila were […]

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Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 4—Mickey Spillane

by Sean Gill

1963 Mickey Spillane is “Mike Hammer”             “When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought about what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book, reading about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences… But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics… All you have to […]

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