Category: Reviews

For surreal fiction to work, the writer must have confidence. No matter how fantastic the images and situations, it always comes back to confidence. The reader should not sense the author’s doubt in either prose or content. The best works of magical realism flood forward on the page like an endless ribbon being pulled, and this is so apparent in Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s newest short story collection, Snow and Shadow.

The short stories collected in Megan Martin’s Nevers do not seem to want to be short stories. They are probably best called something else; fittingly, the cover announces them as “Fictions,” of which there are

As someone who grew up in the south, I am often annoyed by “southern literature” in the same way I am often annoyed by “southern” accents in movies. Books about unplanned pregnancies also often annoy me,

Alan Michael Parker’s The Committee on Town Happiness is made of ninety-nine stories written from the perspective of the titular Committee, an official body charged, apparently, with promoting the happiness of an unnamed town.

“What’s the point of being safe if you don’t feel fully alive?”

I stood in Tahrir Square this past January and eyed the graffiti, what was left of it: FREEDOM, it says in English.

Our early twenty-first century desire for “reality” now seems inseparable from the inception of the War on Terror. Just after 9/11, Ian McEwan confessed that he nearly lost faith in the novel, saying in

Dan Coxon