Modern Day Ghost Stories
In contemporary memoir, like works by Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward, the ghosts that haunt the narrators are past selves, dead loved ones, or other traumas that manifest in these writers’ lives.
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The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write by Gregory Orr
The crystalized, perfectly-clear articulations of grief that begin the collection ring through it, making it impossible to read even the simplest lyric as light.
Reading Carmen Maria Machado’s Update on Carmilla
In this new edition, Machado has taken on the duty of an antique frame restorer. The resulting work is a hybrid form, a beautiful and terrible monster that shifts whenever you look at it, back and forth between history and fantasy, repression and liberation, horror and desire.
The Sound of Trauma
Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s third novel is a story about how trauma flashes, like lightning, but then crashes and reverberates throughout one’s life more slowly, like thunder.
The Dark Side of the Wild
How does the idea of the “wild” manifest itself in the lives, and ways of living, that contemporary America remains both fascinated by and deeply ambivalent about?
Bunny by Mona Awad
Awad’s leap into the unreal summons new life to the familiar woes of academia and art making.
Memory and Documentation in The Barefoot Woman and “Khol Do”
Two works explore violence against women in the midst of the Rwandan genocide and the Partition of India.
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
In Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, the dead resemble the living, and the living seem to be on the brink of death.
Christos Ikonomou’s Greek Debt Crisis Stories
The stories of Ikonomou’s new collection revel in ambiguity, illustrating the crisis in a more nuanced way than many of the “crisis lit” works that reach the U.S. Importantly, too, they demonstrate Ikonomou’s gift for Greek in its rawest spoken form.