Reviewed by Tommy Ebrahimi Colored People Time, the debut collection from writer-producer Manny Fidel, is an uneven read. Driven by Fidel’s personable and at times overly colloquial style, the assembled essays and criticism focus on time’s influence over identity. Essays about 9/11’s irrevocable shift in the author’s worldview, for example, appear alongside eulogies for the summer of 2016, the dying…
By Kevin T. Morales Fantasy is a cooperative challenge. It requires of both author and reader equally strong imagination. In Megan Jauregui Eccles’s debut novel, Sing the Night, magic is invoked by singing, and an intense competition to be the King’s mage takes place in L’Opera du Magician. There’s an inherent challenge in describing music in prose. As The Lovin’…
By Sophie Ann Hinkson Some authors have a magnetic pull—you keep returning to them, as if by fate. Megan Milks is one such writer, first gaining attention with the body-horror short story “Slug,” from their eponymous collection. Milks is also the author of the novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and the recently released Mega Milk, all published by Feminist Press. Their books explore…
By Angelo A. Williams Toni Ann Johnson is a writer The Coachella Review has championed since we published her short story “Daughtered Out” and nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. An award-winning television and film writer and the author of the Flannery O’Connor Prize–winning collection Light Skin Gone to Waste, Johnson has built a career exploring Black family life with…
By Dave Oei T.R. Moore is the debut author of The Gods Must Burn, a dark fantasy novel inspired by Korean myth. The story centers on Basuin, a disgraced war hero-turned-reluctant conqueror plagued with panic attacks and survivor’s guilt. Basuin wishes to follow his dead comrades to the heavenly Winter River instead of hell, known as the Blacksalt Sea, where…
Edited by Cambria Matlow and Angelo A. Williams Voice to Books, meet Voice to Scripts! For this edition we decided to look closely at screenplays as literary documents possessing their own styles, shapes and textures. What kinds of literary choices can screenwriters make to elevate the impact of their stories? What role do craft elements like structure and word choice…
Reviewed by Pallas M. Gutierrez The Tilting House by Ivonne Lamazares follows Yuri, a Cuban teenager during the country’s Special Period, as she navigates the return of her formerly unknown sister and her escape to New York City. Mariela, Yuri’s sister, returns from la Yuma (the United States) in 1993 to uplift the Cuban people and her own artistic practice.…
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…
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…
by Dinamarie Isola She left a box of half-eaten chocolates sitting on his dresser. Waxy and whitened along the edges, they looked inedible, if not fake. He didn’t bother to confirm what he knew to be true: the expiration date had long come and gone. Pitching them into the trash, the mounds of chocolate dinged against the metal rim,…