Joseph Cassara Wants His Characters to Break Your Heart
Sometimes living life truthfully as a queer person of color in this predominantly white hetero-patriarchy feels like a radical political act in and of itself.
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The Way Individuals Survive: On Jen George’s ‘The Babysitter at Rest’
George's frank dystopias do not rely on beauty or brutality or humanistic appeals to sell themselves. Just a vision and a ghoulish sense of humor.
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Don’t Call It a Novel (It’s Been Here for Years)
This phenomenon of misidentifying a story collection as a novel is surprisingly common, both in book reviewing and in polite conversation.
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Throwing Out the Instruction Manual: On Alexandra Kleeman’s ‘Intimations’
Kleeman is working in the surrealism-neighboring-naturalism tradition of preceding wunderkinds like Téa Obreht and Jonathan Safran Foer, where sections of dreamlike allegory supplement sections telling the primary “real life” story.
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Vast and Riotous: On Rion Amilcar Scott’s ‘Insurrections’
His prose feels most alive when he’s pursuing those images and plot twists tied to the minutia of his created world, even if their thematic importance to the story at hand remains cloudy. What does it mean to rewrite the Bible in slang? And how does that redress the sting of police profiling? An answer is there, perhaps, though it has yet to find its fullest articulation.
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