Reviewed by Francesca Jimenez In Yellowface, R.F. Kuang delivers a bingeable, page-turner about cultural appropriation and racial identity. The novel also explores self-victimizing, delusional, and conspiratorial effects of social media, fueled by exploitative, capitalistic values that permeate publishing and are embedded in every crevice of society. Athena Liu and June Hayward followed identical writing paths throughout college, meeting at Yale and taking the same classes. But their career similarities end there. The novel begins at the height of Athena’s career, having achieved the dream: three best-selling books from a major publisher, stellar reviews, multiple awards, and praise across all media…
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The last time I saw Francine, the two of us were secluded in the back of some hole-in-the-wall shop sitting across from one another in a dilapidated booth. While she sat slouched, submerged deep into the worn cushions, sobbing over the messiest of meatball subs, I kept my back straight—determined to maintain my composure with perfect posture and maximize the distance between us, protecting myself from her unsightly marinara splash zone. A disaster was unfolding before my eyes, and it was tough to ignore. Tough to endure. Francine’s lips were chapped, lubricated by a chili-colored coating of grease, not to…
Reviewed by Maxamina Muro The Way to Be, Barbara T. Smith’s memoir, is a ride through the life of a woman born in the 1930s, married in the 1950s, who then emerges as a performance artist in the 1960s, when feminism and equal rights for women became more prominent political and legal movements. While these causes were rooted in practical matters like pay equity, parental rights, and career and academic agency, Smith’s work explored the areas of a woman’s life not covered by laws before, during, and after this time of monumental change. Though Smith doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s…
Reviewed by Betty-Jo Tilley A car crash opens Deepti Kapoor’s novel, Age of Vice, the first of three sweeping sagas about organized crime in contemporary India. This prologue provides a metaphor for the story’s roadmap—a fast-paced and riveting collision course of deception, romance and ambition—and introduces the disparity between rich and poor in a world where only the wealthy win and everyone else’s demise is predetermined by their lower caste. When police arrive at the scene of the accident, they find the chauffeur of the totaled Mercedes passed out, an empty bottle at his side. To show limitless brutality, Kapoor…
The story goes that Cain was too selfish to sacrifice one of his oxen and that was why he offered crops instead, built a pyre of apples and wheat sheaves pumpkins and ears of corn. Or maybe it was some other vegetable or fruit unknown to us cultivated out of existence due to its phallic shape or unpleasant smell. Perhaps closer to the truth is that Cain couldn’t choose which oxen he could let go having raised the lumbering brutes from tiny, red-haired calves that gamboled at his approach and followed him through his morning chores, to these mild-mannered oxen…
Reviewed by Melinda Gordon Blum In November 2017, Claire Dederer’s Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men” documented her personal, lifelong experience of grappling with the problem of separating the art from the artist, exploring whether this is something achievable or even necessary. Monsters is, in part, the book-length outgrowth of that piece. A genre-bridging hybrid of memoir and criticism, the book examines the histories of several artists who (in current terminology) might be classified as problematic. It describes a journey that began when Dederer was a young woman, whose burgeoning identities of writer,…
Reviewed by Jennifer Schuberth While Chloé Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty is a gripping memoir about parenting, disabilities, and figuring out what to do next, it is also a philosophical masterpiece, written in the tradition of those who see philosophy not as a dry academic subject but as a way of life. In prose that is gorgeous, concise, and often very funny, Cooper Jones explores how she has become a person who can say “I am here” and mean it, while also offering the reader practical advice about how to become such a person. Cooper Jones wants to be “in the…
Reviewed by Jeannine Burgdorf Erica Berry’s first book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, casts a wide net, examining definitions of nature, the built environment, borders, nations, history and the self within the context of characterizations of wolves. Ambitious in scope and at times dense with references that can seem digressive, the book maintains Berry’s thesis across its more than 400 pages, organized in chapters that reinforce the Girl v. Wolf, Truth v. Wolf, Self v. Wolf. Each fact and fiction she chooses reinforces that humans live with wolves as a construct, within a cultural understanding,…
By Karen A. Parker “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” These words from the late, great Octavia E. Butler open the New Suns anthology series, edited by the legendary Nisi Shawl. As a founder of the Carl Brandon Society, a Clarion West board member, and an award-winning speculative fiction author, they have fought for increased diversity, equity, and inclusion inside the speculative fiction genre and outside of it. In 2005 with Cynthia Ward, they co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, which remains a seminal text on how writers can craft inclusive stories and characters…
Ask writers from a marginalized community about their workshop experiences, and far too many can reply with stories of being stereotyped, exoticized, infantilized, or disregarded—by fellow workshop participants and instructors alike—for being queer, non-white, female, gender-nonconforming, disabled, neurodivergent, etc. Although more people have vocalized these concerns and requested more diverse creative writing faculties, budget cuts and hiring freezes sometimes hamper even the most well-intentioned attempts at equity and inclusion. But that means writing instructors must hold themselves accountable for creating more open-minded learning environments and take action. Claiming support for marginalized communities is not enough; true allyship involves making a…
By Tamara MC For fans of Educated by Tara Westover, Maid by Stephanie Land, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Michelle Dowd’s debut coming-of-age memoir Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult contains echoes of all three, yet it is wholly unique unto itself. Dowd was born in the 1970s into a survivalist cult called the Field, governed by her grandfather, who was seen as God’s prophet. Much of the memoir is set in the Angeles National Forest at a place Dowd calls the Mountain, as the family prepares for the world’s end. Education became her liberation, and plants played a role in her survival.…
By Dannah Elizabeth In her first full-length poetry collection, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, UC Riverside-Palm Desert alum Mag Gabbert explores the fragmented meanings of language. With striking imagery, she transports readers into a dreamy world where words might be mistaken, misused, or reduced. Drawing from etymological research, Mag Gabbert uses experience and associations to create new portraits of relationships and sex. Playfully weaving myths and research, she challenges readers to examine their own word histories. We spoke to Gabbert about the power of language, her journey to getting the collection published, and how the collection’s title came to be. THE COACHELLA…