Death is a dress never worn, waiting in our closets linen or wool we can die in any season a dress too important to wear, pushed into a dusty corner of occasion dresses bridesmaid dresses don’t fit dresses sale dresses dresses the moths got dresses bought in bad light drunk dresses pooled on the floor worn out dresses worried dresses…
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By Chih Wang If something seems familiar about Mathieu Cailler’s new short story collection, Forest for the Trees, maybe it’s because one of its pieces, “Quickenings,” was first published here at The Coachella Review. In this collection—his seventh book and second of short stories—he brings us intimate moments of people’s quiet suffering, their little joys, losses, and revelations, from a…
G.A. Milnthorpe is an author, playwright, and comedian. His latest novel, Archibald Mountbank and the Miniscule Miracles, is his best, and shortest, to date. He lives in Bury St. Edmunds, UK. You can find him on Facebook and X/Twitter.
Magical realism is often associated with the works of Latin-American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges. However, in an essay for the New York Times titled “Saying Goodbye to Magical Realism,” Silvia Moreno-Garcia describes how the term can be problematic and limiting, not just for Latin-American authors, but for writers as a whole.…
I was struck from behind by a solid gold car. Well, gold as in painted gold and solid as in made of matter. It was really more of a piece of crap on closer inspection. Cracked side-view mirror, dimpled hood, dented grill, rusty caps. The car wasn’t without charm, though. I mean, it was gold. The owner of the vehicle…
By Shannon Glass Fans of Sara Marchant’s work will find the setting and characters of her first novel, Becoming Delilah, familiar. The Coachella Review recently spoke with Marchant about how she expanded her previous novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, to create the new book. The story follows Delilah Ortiz as she moves to a village on an island off…
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…
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…
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…