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…
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By Betty-Jo Tilley Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing journeys back and forth from the 1970s through the ’90s in the US and China. Protagonist Tang Yitian—his surname given in honor of the author’s family—has spent fifteen years in the United States as a college math professor. In the opening pages, he receives a frantic call from his mother, begging him to return to the small rural village he has not seen since he left home, because his father has gone missing. Outside this mystery, the book is also a tale of brotherhood, featuring Yitian’s older brother, Yishou,…
By Rebecca Lauer Paul Tremblay has been speaking to so many interviewers lately that when I started our interview, he responded by discussing the wrong book: after I asked my first question, he answered by mentioning the point of view of Wen, the little girl in his novel The Cabin at the End of the World, which was adapted by M. Night Shyamalan into the movie Knock at the Cabin, which premiered earlier this month. “Oh,” I interrupted him. “I mean for The Pallbearers Club.” He was happy to change the subject. In The Pallbearers Club, the book’s fictional author,…
By Shelbi Glover Adaptations are a daunting specter for a screenwriter. When done well, a film adaptation can cement itself as equally important as its literary counterpart; The Godfather, No Country for Old Men, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Rashomon all come to mind. Then there are the adaptations that, for one reason or another, sour on screen and eventually fade into obscurity. But Max Gee, a UC Riverside-Palm Desert alum, rose to the challenge with her recent short film, Standing Woman. Based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s short story by the same name, Standing Woman is the harrowing and heartbreaking tale…
Constraint is often the birthplace of creativity, but it is also the birthplace of struggle and limitation. Arguably, no other people know this better than queer people of color. Faced with the oppression of their very existence, their intersectional identities allow them to thrive in radical self-acceptance and illuminate the horrors they and others face in their daily lives with grace and fearlessness. In this issue of Voice to Books, we highlight queer authors of color and the characters of color in their stories who show that their identities are more than just checkboxes on questionnaires. We also see glimpses…
By Yennie Cheung When drummer Ryan Dusick left Maroon 5 in 2006, his public statement explained that the nerve damage in his shoulder, sustained from incessant touring, had grown too severe to perform. In reality, the physical pain wasn’t his only hindrance. He’d also grappled with anxiety and alcoholism—an addiction that worsened as he grieved the loss of a band he’d founded in high school. After years of struggle and recovery, Dusick reveals his truth in the memoir Harder to Breathe: A Memoir of Making Maroon 5, Losing It All, and Finding Recovery. With a forward by frontman Adam Levine,…
By Maxamina Muro In Graft, a collection of short stories set in Whittier, just outside of Los Angeles, Margaret Elysia Garcia explores Mexican goth, serial killers, saints, sexuality, and David Bowie. Garcia captures elements of Los Angeles County that are familiar to everyone who lives here, namely that suburbs just outside of the city can feel like another world. Most of the characters in these stories exhibit their own version of Hollywood glamour, whether that means trying to find a way in front of the camera, risking their lives in the process, or dressing in homage to pop stars who…
No one else seemed to notice. Their eyes were downcast so that they only saw the feet and legs of passersby. From that perspective, he looked like an average person walking down the street. Hugh, however, looked up and noticed the head. The eyes had a hollow gaze. They were large and set too far apart, with long, thick lashes curling above them. The nose was crude and flat. He wore an exaggerated smile nearly as wide as his face and full of undeviating rectangular teeth. It was like his features were drawn on with thick strokes. His head seemed…
by Maxamina Muro In our daily lives, we can communicate with people who speak and read entirely different languages with the aid of translation software, though it works best with brief pronouncements. To communicate entire stories, whether a novel, short story, or poem, we need human translators like Kianny N. Antigua. Antigua uses the Spanish language to communicate the complexities of human interactions and is able to translate not just the words on the page but their meaning. Antigua’s translation work connects cultures. It pulls back a curtain that allows a writer working in English to reveal stories for those…
Reviewed by L.A. Hunt In Liz Prato’s latest collection of essays, Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning, she examines Gen-Xers through first-hand boots-on-the-ground accounts. The thing is, as any Gen-Xer will argue, there’s no real club membership card or forgotten generation subscription, and they prefer it that way. They proudly defy categorization, which makes it difficult to sort an entire generation into generic categories. Despite this, Prato’s narrative fearlessly mines early eighties pop culture for the roots of present-day misogyny and bigotry, and the collection strives for tangible cohesion and concise analysis. Prato, a Gen-Xer herself, tersely describes the…
Interviewed by Luree Scott In Pete Hsu’s short story collection If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home, the struggles and sorrows of childhood are brought to light with a fully compassionate view. Family, friends, and strangers change the trajectory of one another’s lives in small ways that are rarely noticed, but Hsu has a way of enlarging moments of intense emotional conflict to show how sometimes it really is the little things that develop so largely in our hearts. While the first six stories are more focused on the perspective of children and how their emotions develop as…
by Melinda Gordon Blum Elissa Bassist’s memoir opens like a medical mystery and segues into a searing indictment of the personal costs—to the soul, body, mind, and spirit—of the malady that is living as a woman within a patriarchy. It turns out there is no real mystery and Bassist is no patient zero; this is an ancient story, an inside-the-house case in which the clues have surrounded us all along. By starting from the vantage point of her own strangled voice and moving outwards, Bassist powerfully locates, contextualizes, and makes personal the impact of misogyny on the female body. The…