REVIEW: Flesh by David Szalay
byFiction. 268 pgs. Scribner. April 2025. 9781982122799. An article about the book Flesh popped on my feed, and the feelings that I suppressed re-emerged. As a (male) writer, one that…
Reviews
REVIEW: Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson
byPoetry. 96 pgs. Scribner. May 2025. 9781668081563. Steven Espada Dawson’s Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025) asks questions of how to move through the world amongst voids and ghosts,…
REVIEW: The Tenth Man by Mahdi Ahmadian
byDrama. 148 pgs. Culicidae Press. April 2025. 9781683151203. The Tenth Man stands as a powerful testament to Mahdi Ahmadian’s command of dramatic form, language, and theatrical technique. Among his body…
REVIEW: What Is Wrong With Men? by Jessa Crispin
byNonfiction. 288 pgs. Pantheon Books. June 2025. 9780593317624. Something is wrong with men. They are stockpiling weapons and exploding Cybertrucks in front of weird hotels. They are drinking on the…
REVIEW: Fight Night by Miriam Toews
byFiction. 272 pgs. Bloomsbury Publishing. January 2023. 9781635579789. Fight Night by Miriam Toews is a short book that packs a punch. We hear it straight from eight-year-old Swiv, who is…
REVIEW: The Jig of Life: Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster by Derek Coyle
byPoetry. 155 pgs. Magnus Grehn Forlag. 2024. County Carlow is the second smallest county in Ireland, rural and inconspicuous, certainly not the place you would expect to find a kitchen…
REVIEW: Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman
byFiction. 320 pgs. Quirk Books. January 2025. 9781683693956. January of 2025: a particularly poignant time to publish anything political. So much so that it was hard to encounter a piece…
REVIEW: On Breathing by Jamieson Websiter
byNonfiction. 272 pgs. Catapult. March 2025. 9781646222414. For several years I have been periodically giving up on and coming back to a slow, intricate, difficult, but engrossing computer game called…
REVIEW: Devout by Hadley Jones
byPoetry. 90 pgs. Riot in Your Throat. December 2024. 9798988989844. There is a wicked cleverness to DEVOUT by Hadley Jones. They are one of those poets who appear to have…
REVIEW: Proper Imposters by Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Jason Ockert, and Jeff Parker
byNovellas. 206 pgs. Panhandler Books. January 2024. 9780991640485. As its title suggests, Proper Imposters is a collection of stories about muddied identities. Within each of its four novellas—written by four…