Book Review Online

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

By Rosemarie Ho

A young woman in Tokyo fakes a pregnancy in order to mess with her male coworkers. Will her scheme have meaningful effect?

Book Review Online

Something Like Vellum

By Noor Qasim

Zain Khalid’s debut novel wrestles with the urge to shatter the coherent world and examine its parts, and the desire to reconcile reality to narrative.

Book Review Online

Not Not Michel Houellebecq

By Digby Warde-Aldam

French high jinks and Singani 63 cocktails. It’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but equally, not nearly as annoying as it sounds.

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Scars or Wings

By Leah Silvieus

In Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust, the reviewer finds a novel brushing up against the limits of its form. 

Book Review Online

Profoundly Out of Joint

By Chelsea Leu

Thuận’s Chinatown is sad, delightfully prickly, and a defiantly inscrutable act of resistance that insists that we make space for the things that don’t make sense.

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Between Knowing and Not Knowing

By Ben Eastham

The late-career style of painter Philip Guston, as seen through the eyes of a friend.

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The Other Side of Faggotry

By Bobuq Sayed

In Paul Dalla Rosa’s story collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, Bobuq Sayed finds dramatic irony, alienation, and psychic depravity.

Book Review Online

Vicious Vortext

By Richard Hegelman

In her second novel, Paradais, Fernanda Melchor returns to familiar, brutal subject matter, but narrows in on fewer characters. The result is claustrophobic and enthralling.

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Two Sides of the Same Coin

By Julia Sanches

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others, Julia Sanches finds a writer more interested in introspection than dialogue.

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The Future Is Canceled

By Izidora Angel

The urgent and unsubtle horror of Gospodinov’s Time Shelter is that the present is grayed out, that there’s more past than future.

Book Review Online

Concrete Reveries

By Adam Dalva

Hernan Diaz is making a career out of taking on some of the biggest archetypal American novels—the Western, and now the Wealth Novel.

Book Review Online

In Absolute Splendor

By Julia Kornberg

Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls inherits the scarcity, libido, and memory of queer literary traditions in Latin America, rethinking her predecessors to create forms anew.

Book Review Online

Time Is the Raw Material

By Declan Fry

In her novel Activities of Daily Living, Lisa Hsiao Chen considers the topography of a long life. How does it look, how does it feel, how does it move? And what does it become, when placed under duress, under constraint?