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…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…