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Y.T. is a tightly-drawn novella with a novel’s breathing room for reflection and reminiscence. While the title and the early pages seem to point at the importance of the game itself, by the end it seems the game was merely an instigator, and could have been any product of creative energy misconstrued by a humorless regime to be seditious.
I’ve read Sarah Sgro’s poetry for about four years, and remain a consistent witness to its various evolutions and concentrations concerning femininity, food, sexuality, and waste. In the past year, Sgro’s work has flourished, wreaked havoc, and run amok through many journals. Because her pieces keep sharpening their knives, it can prove difficult to…
We were discussing the character of teenage girl in a fantasy novel. “I like that the girl is not what you expect,” said one writer, “You expect girls to be sweet and innocent, but she’s strong and takes action,” he said. Huh, I thought. Do we expect girls to be sweet and innocent? If you’re…
In the opening piece in Sara Majka’s haunting debut collection of linked stories, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, the narrator announces that she is in the middle of a divorce and about to board a train into a city. Her solution to her problems is “to move from place to place, trying to thread together,…
From a protest over the imprisonment of an Egyptian writer to the first ever female-led crime writing festival, here are the latest literary headlines: PEN America is teaming up with writers across the globe to protest the “unjust imprisonment” of Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji. Last week, at least 120 prominent writers signed an open letter demanding…
There’s something happening with the personal in writing, and Jason Guriel’s highly circulated Walrus essay “I Don’t Care About Your Life” wants to warn us about it. “I Don’t Care About Your Life” isn’t as polemical as it sounds. For one, its title doesn’t so much reveal Guriel’s hand, as lampoon precisely the under-achieving self-referential…
I take the five students of my poetry micro-workshop outside to discuss Claudia Emerson’s latest collection Impossible Bottle. As we sit in the sun, bending over the brilliant bright book pages, a student points to the poem “Metastasis: Web” and volunteers to read it aloud before our analysis of the author’s craft choices. You—join us….
It’s often said that writers must be willing to be cruel to their characters, lest the story they tell lack drama or stakes. In “The Space of Things” (The Cossack Review), Jacinta Escudas (Translated by Samantha Memi) offers a different take on the cold realities of the writer/protagonist relationship. Escudos begins the story by…
I’ve been stoked for a number of novels this month, but maybe none as much as Chris McCormick’s Desert Boys. It’s his first collection, a series of linked stories. His progressions are thematic. The prose is lovely, and the guy seems like an ace—but more so than the subject matter, or even the promise of…
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