Reviewed by Sydney Abraham Lorena Hughes’s historical novel The Night We Became Strangers covers many themes, including grief, remorse, romance, and pursuit. The book is a fictionalized account of the catastrophic 1949 Ecuador adaptation of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, during which listeners were never informed that the broadcast of Martians invading the Earth was fiction and thus…
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Reviewed by T.J. Tranchell Certain books defy expectations, even when a reader goes into one without them. Uncanny Valley Girls, the new memoir by poet Zefyr Lisowski, adeptly subverts even the expectations that seem to be set up by the author. Lisowski brings a self-deprecating sense of humor along with an expansive openness to this recounting of her life as…
Reviewed by Eric Martin Minor Black Figures finds Brandon Taylor taking up art and artists as his subject, as he did in his novel The Late Americans. This time, the setting is New York City and the artists aren’t writers. They’re painters. They’re sculptors. They make videos. Importantly, they’re also insiders in a small circle of ambitious artists, a milieu…
Interviewed by Julie Colbrese With previous novels, award-winning author Jake Hinkson found success exploring the dark side of his home state of Arkansas—a far cry from the seedy Los Angeles depicted in the Raymond Chandler books he read in his youth. But with his eighth book, You Will Never See Me, Hinkson takes readers on another twisted tale of crime…
By C.E. McKenna Los Angeles writer Kate Maruyama has been widely published in the horror genre, including a supernatural piece TCR recommended for a Pushcart Prize. But her most recent book, Alterations, is more appropriately shelved next to intergenerational dramas like Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. It follows three women in the Morello family—Adriana, Lizzie, and…
By Pallas Gutierrez The last time The Coachella Review checked in with Daniel A. Olivas, we published a review of his short story collection My Chicano Heart, a work that we described as both experimental and expertly crafted, starkly realistic and deeply magical. In his latest work, Olivas takes the experiments further with his first play, Waiting for Godínez. Inspired…
Reviewed by Betty Fall Zuzana Říhová’s Playing Wolf is an at times elusive yet consistently dread-inducing fairytale that challenges its readers to unravel the chaotic mess of motivations, emotions, and intentions of its characters to better understand the misery that is soon to transpire. Translated to English by Alex Zucker, the story follows husband and wife Bohumil and Bohumila Novotný…
Reviewed by Noelle Trost Helen Oyeyemi has long been celebrated for her blending of the surreal with the everyday. She casts reimagined fairytales with a coating of her own formidable imagination—such as in Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird—reworking familiar stories in opulent, detailed, and extravagant ways while maintaining a sharp eye for human relationships. Her latest novel, A New…
By Breen Nolan Howling Women, the debut novel of Write or Die magazine senior editor Shelby Hinte, is a fierce story about friendship, revenge and the emotional scars that never fade. It’s also a book about violence, addiction and female rage. Sabine Haegan, Howling Women’s protagonist, is a woman on the run. She abandoned her crumbling life and marriage in…
Reviewed by Jessica Ribera Evoking riveting murder and courtroom dramas from its start, Victor Suthammanont’s debut novel Hollow Spaces combines the satisfaction of solving a mystery and the adrenaline of a thriller. With tight, descriptive language and carefully developed depictions of emotion and relationships, it also presents as a literary family drama in which the siblings’ opposing beliefs about their…
Edited by Cambria Matlow and Dave Oei Though for many of us these times feel unprecedented, the need to make “good trouble” is timeless. The term, coined by civil rights icon and United States Representative John Lewis, points to taking necessary actions of resistance against systems of oppression in service to our shared humanity and collective liberation. These works, ranging…